Criminally Insane 2

Due to budget cuts, Ethel Janowski (again played by Priscilla Alden) is released from a mental institution (even though she killed six people) and delivered to the Hope Bartholomew halfway house. Once there, she immediately relapses into her criminally insane ways and kills anyone who gets between her and her food.

HOLY MOLY! Does this movie suck! You know you are in trouble when the open credits start up and they are just the credits from the first film, apparently filmed off a TV screen. Nick Millard (under his pseudonym Nick Phillips) decided to return to the world of Crazy Fat Ethel over ten years later and with a budget that probably covered the cost of a blank tape and a video camera rental for the weekend. Let's just say that Millard's unique style doesn't translate well to video. Seriously, I have made home movies with more production value than this. And Millard tries to pull a SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 2 by padding half the running time with footage from the first film (which looks like it was taken off a worn VHS copy). Alden is again good as Ethel but the film is so inept that you start to feel sorry for her for starring in this garbage. I mean, at least the first film tried. Here we have no music, weaker effects (if that is at all possible), shaky camera work, horrible audio and editing that looks like it was done with two VCRs hooked up. Avoid this at all costs!

Ah yes. Crazy fat Ethel is back...and she's still hungry. But did the world really need this sequel? Don't get me wrong, there's a soft spot in my heart for the original slice of movie cheese. How could you go wrong with a premise so...well...delicious. A fat woman dispenses with anyone who gets in the way of her and a refrigerator. And the movie will forever be on our guilty pleasure list of 70's drive-in sleaze that we must go back and view every couple of years.

But along comes this sequel, shot entirely on camcorder with no music, no real edits, and no real point. Crazy fat Ethel (now minus a few pounds) is released from the mental ward into a halfway house where she begins killing anyone who gets in the way of her eating. Old habits die hard, I guess.

However, all of that only takes up about ten minutes of screen time. The rest of the running time is padded with flashback footage from the original film. So we'll get new scenes of Ethel taking a nap, the camcorder zooms in to her face, and we cut to old scenes from part one. Repeated ad nauseum. So much footage from part one is used that, if you've never seen the original, you'll see it all here. And it looks like a masterpiece compared to the new footage.

We get ridiculously long scenes of a character eating an entire candy bar, Ethel eating an entire bowl of pudding, Ethel dancing around out back with a bloody knife, etc. And since it's filmed on camcorder, there's crummy picture and sound to back it all up. Seeing this with the original footage only made me appreciate the original that much more.

So, skip this and stick with the original.

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

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.