Criminally Insane 2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!