Word: horror
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What helped was another police beating, 3,000 miles away. Seven days after Colbert's encounter, the nation's attention shifted from Kuwait to Los Angeles, where Rodney King had been beaten senseless by a gang of vengeful cops. As weeks passed and police everywhere pondered the King horror, the Philadelphia department's internal investigation was leading commanders to a logical conclusion; this was no time for a cover-up. So they released photos of Ryan and Blondie, who had been suspended during the probe, to local newspapers. A flood tide followed. Complaints about the cops' behavior inundated the department...
...guess the original killer in Friday the 13th and, ahem, choose incorrectly. Cannily crammed with the likes of Neve, Courteney and Skeet (if these names seem meaningless, you're just in an obsolete demographic) and directed with twisted bravura by the incomparable Wes Craven, Scream became the highest grossing horror movie ever, reviving the moribund slasher genre and lifting its author into Hollywood's screenwriting elite. When the Williamson-scripted I Know What You Did Last Summer (starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sarah Michelle Gellar) ruled the box office for three weeks running, his coronation...
After that, it'd be hard to deny that the strong points in Scream 2--a movie so meant to engage the audience's memory, expectations and self-reflexive reactions--are not the meta ones, but standard horror applied in ever more surprising ways (but not too surprising; things peter out quickly). For example, a man accompanied by two others in a wide open campus field in front of several buildings is stalked and killed by man. Trying to outwit his assailant as he speaks with him on a cell phone, the man is pied-pipered to his own doom...
...when such heights are not reached, the movie degenerates into the plain vanilla horror's episodic nature of red herrings and and-then-there-were-none character elimination. The self-aware cleverness of the movie's premise survives only in spirit, as the events pale in comparison: we feel gypped, but then the movie just set impossible standards for itself...
Disregarding Kelly's lame "One More Chance," the R & B songs honestly and freshly present twists on Scream 2's horror theme. D'Angelo does the best job with his cover of "She's Always In My Hair," written by the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. He sings hypnotically while the backing music provides the ultimate in sublime background for a slasher movie. The movie's theme "Scream," by Master P featuring Sukk the Shocker, presents a wailing cry for help, obviously fitting into Wes Craven's attempt to bring the horror movie genre into mainstream pop culture. Most humorously...