Criminally Insane 2

During the cheap filmed in video beginning of Crazy Fat Ethel II, I wondered if it was the same film that was on the cover. Unfortunately, it was. The story itself is mindlessly simple. Ethel, a homicidal maniac with an eating disorder, is released into a halfway house because of hospital overcrowding. She is by far the most sane resident watching while one man puts dead flies into another's soup. Ethel is then teased by one of the halfway house employees with a chocolate bar after he hits on the cost cutting measure of feeding the residents dog food. Ethel retaliates by strangling him with a wire noose on the stairs and then....well, you get the idea. If this all sounds like fun, it isn't. This film was poorly made with cheap effects and even worse acting. The characters are so wooden when delivering their lines that they should be standing out in front of a cigar store. To make matters worse, half of the film consists of flashbacks to the first Ethel movie, Criminally Insane, which is little better. A VERY poor effort.

The first movie is pretty good. This one is pretty bad.

Recycles a lot of footage (including the opening credits and end title) from Criminally Insane. The new footage, shot on video, really sticks out as poorly done. Scenes lack proper lighting, the sound is sometimes nearly inaudible, there's even video glitches like the picture rolling and so on.

Like all bad sequels, it basically just repeats the story of the first one. Ethel kills everybody who shares her living space, often for reasons having to do with them getting in the way of food she wants.

At least it is only an extra on the DVD for the first one, which also includes the same director's film Satan's Black Wedding. Too bad it doesn't include the Death Nurse movies though.

It's not a surprise that "Criminally Insane 2" makes the original look better because face it, belated and unnecessary sequels to cult classics often fail to deliver. However, things go further than that: "Criminally Insane 2" actually manages to make the original look expensive! Part 1 only cost $30000 to make, but this one seems like it's literally made for nothing. To give you a rough idea about how much money and effort making this movie took: the opening credit sequence is just the "Criminally Insane" credits taped of a TV screen. Yikes. There wasn't even any money for actual film this time around either, so writer/director Nick Millard actually resorts to shooting the whole thing with a freaking camcorder. Well, the whole thing...that's not entirely true, given that about half of the movie is stock footage from the first one (cleverly disguised as Ethel's dreams). There's roughly 35 minutes worth of new stuff (presumably all filmed in one afternoon), and each second of it makes you want to burn something down. Your "new" story only lasts half an hour, how the hell can it be so mind-numbingly boring? It's truly unbelievable how much this movie drags, these boring, faceless characters take forever to die. And even when Ethel finally kills them all, she does it in aggravatingly lame ways. This isn't just a lackluster sequel, this is nothing more than a scam. It's sad something like this can be so widely distributed, let's just pretend it never happened.

Criminally Insane 2 (1987)

BOMB (out of 4)

Incredibly horror film that ranks as one of the worst ever made. Like many "sequels" of the 80s, this here takes about forty-minutes worth of footage from the first film and adds 20-minutes worth of new footage, which was all shot on a camcorder. Even the opening and closing credits were lifted from the first film!!!

Criminally Insane (1975)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

The title pretty much sums up this incredibly bizarre, politically incorrect exploitation film that fans should really eat up. 300 pound plus Ethyl gets out of an insane asylum but she's outraged that people want her to go on a diet so she starts killing anyone who gets between her and food. Running just over 60-minutes this film is technically pretty bad but the outrageous subject matter makes for a very fun movie in the same vein of a John Waters film. There's plenty of violence and fake blood to make you giggle, although the "joke" of an obese person killing gets old after the thirty-minute mark.

truly, this film amazes. how did this get made? who forked over the 2.50 for the video cassette to go in the camcorder? imagine a film made by your inbred relatives, the ones that find an evening at kentucky fried chicken to be the height of cuisine. then, make sure they're on drain-o when the camera light is on. scenes extend into the horizon. a man eats a candy bar for what seems to be hours. ethel experiences flashbacks to a higher-budgeted film. the film does, however, achieve a surreal, bbc science-fiction edge by intercutting between film and video. crazy fat ethel II is blessed, however, with one of those immediately fascinating titles. forgiveness comes easy to crazy fat ethel II. priscilla alden delivers a performance that is equal parts ham and thorazine-induced coma. the music for the "film" is fascinating...at first, i found it remarkable that nick phillips had managed to create such unique, throbbing gristle-esque vistas of sound...then i realized it's simply the ten-dollar mic trying desperately to capture every nuance of alden's vocal performance. when she bleats, "give me those pretzels, granny!" the film takes a colossal lunge toward greatness. in fact, i keep muttering it to myself, even though there's nary a pretzel or a grandmother in the house. one could extrapolate a fascinating political subtext in this film, as budget cuts in reagan's america force an obese, psychotic woman to kill again and again. can we see ethel janowski as our own bloated, selfish american ego? what? oh, you're right. it really is a piece of crap...but, mark my words, dub in it swedish, sell it as an art film about "the ugly american"...and you'd have a box-office bonanza.