The sequel maintains the slightly elevated level of cleverness of its forerunner, or at least level of aspiration to cleverness. It starts out with a sneak-preview screening of a Hollywood cheapie called Stab, based on a "true-crime" book by "Gale Weathers" about the "real" serial killings in Scream (difficult to talk about these movies without quotation marks), and very soon a new series of copycat killings shifts the focus of the movie's self-referential knowingness away from the dead-teenager genre in particular and toward the broader subject of sequels. The double-killer ploy of the earlier movie taught us not to eliminate anyone from the list of suspects just because he or she is somewhere else when a killing occurs, but the earlier movie and its entire genre taught us also the fruitlessness of matching wits with unscrupulous filmmakers. There is one excruciating suspense sequence when the -- or a -- masked killer commandeers the police car in whose backseat the heroine and her roommate have been locked for their protection. This, though, segues into one of those endless endings that passes into absurdity with many minutes to spare, and at the same time lays bare the absurdity of all the events up to that point. Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Liev Schreiber, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Laurie Metcalf; directed by Wes Craven. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd