Rating: D-
Dir: Marcel Walz
Star: Natalie Scheetz, Manoush, Annika Strauss, Nick Principe
To anyone who thinks Uwe Boll is the worst director ever, I present this piece of counter-evidence, a sequel to his 2006 serial-killer pic, which wasn’t great, but had one memorable sequence and was at least semi-competent. Put beside this, however, it looks like Silence of the Lambs, for the sequel is tedious as all get-out, peppered with unlikeable characters, implausible narrative, tedious sequences and largely unimpressive gore. Quite what the connection to the original is, is hard to say: yes, Max Seed (Principe here, replacing Will Sanderson) is in it. But he’s now roaming the Nevada desert as part of some kind of bizarre religious cult, with his wife (Manoush), who is supposedly the girl he abducted at the end of the first film?
But she has somehow turned into a thoroughly unconvincing fake police officer, with a thick German accent and sporting an Iowa uniform in the middle of the Nevada desert? Anyway, their latest targets are an RV full of bachelorettes driving back from Las Vegas to Chicago. Really, fill in the rest of the plot yourself. You’ll probably do so more imaginatively than the film-makers here did. There’s just so much here that is absolute shit. The fractured time-line; the ignorance of basic geography (at one point, one of the girls suggests a quick detour to the Grand Canyon – which is close to 300 miles from Las Vegas, in the opposite direction to Chicago); the whiny dialogue between the girls; their unfailing inability to behave with a morsel of common sense; the monotonous delivery of Manoush.
That list just goes on, and this barely avoids receiving the dreaded Trash City F rating: the soundtrack is decent, Principe has some screen presence and there’s one scene that intercuts Manoush reading from the Bible with childhood photos of seed, that is actually effective. That last may simply be in comparison to the rest of this dreadful mess, which is unquestionably made ten times worse by the poor decision to throw the whole thing into a blender, and randomize the order of scenes, to little point and even less effect. Really, it’s almost as if Boll gave the makers the sequel, only on the strict condition they were to make him look like Orson Welles. Mission accomplished, boys. Maybe their next movie should be Plan 10 From Outer Space.