Criminally Insane 2

Nick Millard aka Nick Phillips should have left well-enough alone when he made "Criminally Insane" 10 years before the release of this god-awful waste of time and effort. The fact that the original "Criminally Insane" was less than an hour in length should have clued him into the fact that he had probably milked this storyline for all he was going to get out of it...but instead he opts to use TONS of footage from the original in this one as well, even to the point of recycling the original opening credit sequence! Unfortunately, bringing back the rapidly aging Priscilla Alden did not save this one. What little bit of original footage there was in this flick looks as if it were filmed with a rented hand-held camcorder! If this film cost more than $100 to make I would be very surprised and I would be equally surprised if it made anything close to that amount! Avoid this one and watch the original instead!

This film was made only because of the first films success. It features the same fat killer but she's a lot older now. Not nearly as fat either. It shows a lot of the first films highlights, basically living off the gore in the first film. Because, this film has little to no money to spend on special effects. Later, "J" w KandJHorror.com

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.

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.