Single White Female 2: The Psycho (2005)

CAUTION: Plot spoilers present.PR executive Holly Parker breaks up with her boyfriend & moves out of her shared apartment when she catches her best friend & co-worker Jan Lambert sleeping with him. She moves into the apartment of Tess Kositch, a painfully shy nurse who desperately needs a friend. But as soon as she settles in, Holly notices a strange number of behaviours with Tess, who has a history of convincing her friends to kill themselves in suicide pacts that she keeps getting out of. Tess also kills some of the patients in her care & frequents an underground S&M club. As Holly tries to come to terms with her new friend's lifestyle, Tess plans to drive Holly to suicide, first by killing off her friends.SINGLE WHITE FEMALE was a thriller that became a hit during the early 1990s – one of a number of psycho-thrillers that made their name at that time. Along with Basic Instinct & the bunny-boiler Fatal Attraction, Single White Female was part of a new era of thriller, which concerned itself less with traditional boogeymen & more with dangerously unstable female characters who latch onto their prey like a lion hunting a gazelle & wreak havoc in their target's families. Despite not exactly leaving the door open for a sequel, SWF somehow managed to spawn a direct-to-video sequel with Single White Female 2: The Psycho in 2005, a good thirteen years after the original came out.I had a sinking feeling when I hired the DVD & saw the names of Andy Hurst & Ross Helford on the sleeve as the writers – these two had made their name writing various sequels to the classic John McNaughton thriller WILD THINGS, which was actually a parody of the same kind of film that SWF belonged to. What works for a thriller parody doesn't quite work for a serious film like SWF 2. Needless to say, the film doesn't get very far.The main problem with a direct-to-video sequel such as SWF 2: The Psycho (yeah, I know, the title needed a lot more work) is that you're trying to hit a niche market – fans of early 1990s' psycho-thrillers, mainly – but by hiring a pair of writers who had made themselves known for their parodies of the very genre your film is in, the hope of a serious film goes right outside the window. Indeed most fans of the original film had trashed this sequel badly due to this very reason. But on the other side of the coin, the film emerges remarkably better than I had initially hoped would happen. Helford & Hurst actually manage to do something serious for a change, although they drop the numerous threesomes that come in their bread-&-butter scripts (the Wild Things sequels) & replace it with a much more restrained thriller. It is quite strange to see that with the original, Jennifer Jason Leigh & Bridget Fonda were already big stars when they started work on SWF, yet went ahead with baring their bodies – yet here, Kristen Miller & Allison Lange are complete unknowns but must have had 'no-nudity' clauses put into their contracts, judging by the fact that they both don't appear naked. I suspect that had they allowed themselves to appear starkers, they would have gotten more fans than what ultimately transpired here. Other than that, I had no problem with the acting.The story is another issue – I didn't buy the heroine's plight due to her character being a complete floozy – Kristen Miller's PR executive deliberately has sex with her client for a promotion yet dumps him when her friend & co-worker does it with him (something that would have worked better were this a Wild Things sequel) & goes through her new friend's personal belongings & spies on her. This I didn't like. Still, the film is not a total loss – the thriller mechanics, once they kick in, do the job reasonably. But as far as sequels go, Single White Female 2: The Psycho is far from what the original film deserved.

Does the director of Single White Female 2 have an underwear fetish? Every five minutes there seemed to be a scene with a sexy woman walking around in her lingerie. I counted about six different colours too! Victoria's Secrets must have bankrolled the film for product placement. Not just that, but he takes every opportunity to show these nubile young things bending down or standing at an angle to get the highest ratio of cleavage. Yet, when it comes to delivering the goods, by delivering the whole boob experience, he chickens out and instead gives us a selection of body doubles or back shots. The only nude scenes in the entire movie are in a club for perverts, as tied-up extra get whipped, violated or abused in other ways. Nice.What? You wonder why a spent a whole paragraph discussing the finer points of on-screen nakedness? Because it's a distraction from having to write about the rest of the film. If you've seen the original, you'd think this has a similar plot: A nice, normal girl is going to move in with a deranged lady (The clue's in the title) who slowly takes over her flatmate's life, while simultaneously slaughtering her new flatmate's friends one by one. Correct, but with just one exception. The nice girl in part II is not a very nice person. In fact, she's downright despicable. She lies to her friends, she breaks personal belongings then denies it, she unlocks boxes containing cherished possessions to have a look inside, and yes, she is a total bitch. Any right minded person would love to see her get a comeuppance. Bridget Fonda she ain't.So, besides her and the mad, pensioner-murdering, nurse roomie, is there anybody else in this cocktail of bad acting and materialistic values to root for? Well, there's the main protagonist's slutty best friend who seems to be an exact copy of her dreadful mate.. only difference is one's a redhead, the other's locks are black. They work at a PR firm together, and their competitiveness in being the first to get a promotion is completely boring to everyone at home. Then there's the dopey hunk of a boyfriend who comes between these two bimbos.. he leaves so little impression in the picture he might as well stand there in his striped boxer shorts scratching his butt while the gals fight it out. If anyone looks like they just wondered in from a GAP ad, it's him. I DID enjoy the performance of the girl's boss at the company, sadly his acerbic wit only livens up a handful of scenes.. then it's back to the bitchiness and general air of tedium that set the tone for the rest of the movie.Not only are 95% of the people featured here incredibly irritating, they are also extremely stupid. Why is there blood on the floor? Why, the workman cut his hand while trying to fix something and he's just gone to the hospital! Of course I believe you! Next, I think I'll drink this wine given to me by someone I suspect is borderline insane. Is it drugged? Certainly not!! Then, we have the big treasure chest which conveniently contains news clippings about every victim the villianess has ever murdered, as well as her life history, discovered by the 'heroine'. So much for covering up the evidence. The class of serial killers just ain't wot it used to be. Still, at least this gives audience members who haven't been watching for the last hour a chance to catch up with the storyline. Oh and yes, I am being sarcastic. DUH!Finally, we have the predictable HUGE CLIMAX between the two women, though why anybody would bother to cut the main phone line so the other party can't summon help with the surfeit of mobiles in America in 2005 is a mystery to me. It works, though. Strange, that she's had her Nokia with her in every scene other than that one. Much hysterical shrieking, pseudo-lesbianism and gratuitous throat slashing of black police officers ensues, until finally the torture is over and we can all go home. And no, I don't means the torment endured by the local constabulary at knife-point. Straight To DVD should have meant Straight To The Bin in this case. YUCK! 2/10

How does that line in "Henry VIII I Am" go? Oh, yeah: "Second verse...same as the first!" When the movie first started, I thought Burns' character was going to be the bad girl in here, as she's done before, but that she wasn't was the only mild surprise in this film. If you've seen the original with Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh, you're not missing much by skipping this film. I noticed it was so bad, it was never even released theatrically in the US! The girls are all pretty, but the film is pretty predicable.Save yourself the trouble and rent the first one on DVD! Like I stated in the summary, 2 out of 10 stars is a gift to this film. I'm actually surprised that I couldn't wait for this movie to end so I could end up trashing it like I've done..and if you've ever read any of my other reviews, you'd see that it would take a lot for me to trash something like this. Unfortunately, I can't find one thing to save this movie.

TV director Keith Samples at his first long format film, directs a team of of unknown actors in this mediocre flick. The story is set in a PR firm in Manhattan, where female rivalry seems to be leading sooner or later not only to bad flat partnership, and boyfriends swapping, but soon to crime. The criminal element may however show up from the direction of the third female, the apparently innocent good girl, too innocent for the viewer not to suspect that she is going to draw aggressively the kitchen knife, sooner or later. I am hinting to the main problem of this film. Although the story is not that bad the lack of experience and inspiration of the director and actors lead to a much too predictable film, which is not much more that an opportunity to show some flesh and some blood, but is neither sexy enough or scary enough for the viewers to care.