 Dir. Nick Philips, USA, 61 minS Last week we took a look at the low-budget slasher Criminally Insane, a movie with a good core concept but hamstrung by all sorts of issues – bad acting, terrible editing, awful and unrealistic effects and a horribly rushed finale. But wait, there's more, because for some reason – and a mere twelve years later – the sequel to the 1975 original arrived. Why on earth it took so long to put together is beyond me, as honestly is why anyone even bothered to put it together. Now the first one was bad, don't get me wrong, but it had the odd moment and, as I said, with a higher budget and some different actors, there was something that could have worked. Criminally Insane 2 – and there's no easy way to say this – feels like one the absolute laziest, most half-arsed sequels I've ever seen. It's fair to say that sequels are practically renowned for not living up to the original, but this one didn't have a high bar set for it. Anyway, let's explore further... Criminally Insane 2 sees Ethel Janowksi, our lead from the first movie, in an asylum which is suffering with horrible budget cuts. As such, the head of the establishment decides that all inmates with no trouble on their records for the last five years will be released into half-way houses – which takes in Ethel, of course. Forget the fact that she killed six people twelve years before, why not just let her out and free? So Ethel finds herself at Bartholomew House, run by Hope Bartholomew, which she shares with a couple of other similar recently released patients – including a man who openly admits killing at least three of his wives. Of course it's not long before some of the visitors and residents start to agitate Ethel, and the killing begins once again. The most criminal (if you'll excuse the pun) thing this movie does is the overuse of footage from the previous movie – in fact I would estimate at least 25 minutes of the 61 here are made up of clips from the first film, which leaves remarkably little new material here. If you've seen the first – which of course I have, and expect many viewers of this one will as well – then practically half of the runtime is absolutely irrelevant to you. This comes in dream sequences and flashbacks for the most part, with long scenes of Ethel sleeping and having nightmares about her past crimes. Not only that, there are scenes in here that actively feel like they are killing time – there are long scenes of eating and food preparation throughout. Maybe the director is trying to say something there, but two minutes of a man serving the residents of Bartholomew House dog food is utterly unnecessary. In all these cases you could have cut down by half or more, but then this one would have likely been 40 minutes or something like. On top of that, it inherits all the same problems as the original – horrendous acting, hokey effects and unrealistic-looking blood, choppy and baffling cuts from one scene to the next, and another bizarre attempted twist in the last ten seconds of the film that just doesn't seem to click with anything else. I can't imagine this was a sequel that anyone was crying out for, and it pads its length in all sorts of ways to hit that classic follow-up issue – namely, it's not as good as the original, and the original wasn't really up to much in the first place... RATING: 0.5/10. One of the oddest sequels I've ever seen, in that it borrows so heavily from the first despite barely reaching what you could call full film-length. If you've seen part one you could skip over practically half of this and miss nothing. This one doesn't have as good a concept, and the troubles of the original feel exacerbated – in fact I'm only giving it a half-point for a single scene that really made me laugh out loud. If it only avoids nil points for an unintentional splash of humour then that likely tells you all you need to know – it's a bottom of the barrel scraping 0.5/10 from me. 
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