2008 Horror Fest: Reeker 2, Rise Of The Reeker: 34 Out Of 100 Stars

These 34 stars are a generous misnomer, as this is not a film that taken as a whole deserves 34 stars. There are however, many small pieces and elements of this film that are wasted and/or not followed through well enough upon for me to say that there's something buried underneath this rather awkward and jumbled film to maybe recommend you to watch it, maybe.

Let's start with the good. First off there's a neat story here and an interesting plot device that deserves to be in a more engaging overall film. There is some funny comedy in parts, that although it feels way out of place, really made me laugh. There are also a good amount of "jump" moments and decent gore. Lastly the main villain is set up very nicely, unfortunately the execution of his character leaves a lot to be desired as he just isn't used nearly as well as you think he will be.

What didn't work was a lot of the acting. There are 3 main "good guy" characters and they're all pretty bad actors, not that what they're given to say or work with is anything special. The 3 main "bad guy" characters are a lot better but outside of a scene here or there also aren't given much to work with.

For having such a nice location to shoot on the director doesn't really give us that good a feel for our surroundings in the film. People move around a lot, go off in different directions and do a lot of moving but they never seem to end up too far from where they started and we're never given a good sense of where buildings are in correlation to each other. The directing just isn't very good at all.

The script also drags pretty badly at points and we're given pretty unnecessary back story that can in no way be conveyed by the actors trying to convey it. There's a rather gross and long scene where one of the baddies has his car keys flushed down the toilet. So what does he do? Well he climbs down into a bomb shelter adjacent to the septic tank, breaks thru the wall and swims around in sewage looking for the keys. It's a nonsensical waste of nearly 10 minutes of film.

What we have here is a good setup not delivered upon, a rather lame villain, both in script and on the screen as he is filmed badly and in a fashion that makes it hard to really get into his kill scenes. Add in a pretty poor cast and some dumb and cliched writing and you've get a bad movie that perhaps more could have been done with in the hands of someone who has a better ability to flesh out the crap and focus on the few good ideas the script presents.