Criminally Insane 2 (1987)

User Rating:

1.9/10   

Director:

Nick Millard

Writer:

Nick Millard (writer)

Genre:

Horror

Tagline:

Fatty, fatty 4X4, can't get in the kitchen door!

Plot:

A mental hospital, faced with a severe decrease in funding, is forced to release mass-murderer Ethel Janowski into a halfway house...

Plot Keywords:

Murder | Mental Patient | Psycho Killer | Female Killer | Obese Woman

Cast

Priscilla Alden	...	Ethel Janowski
Michael Flood
Jane Lambert
Robert Copple
C.L. Lefleur
Ginna Martine
Cliff McDonald
Charles Egan
Sonny La Rocca
Sandra Shotwell
Lisa Farros

Also Known As:

Crazy Fat Ethel 2 (USA) (video box title)

Runtime:

70 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Filming Locations:

Monterey, California, USA

Company:

I.R.M.I. Films Corporation

Trivia:

The first half of this movie is built up almost entirely out of flashback footage from part one.

Quotes:

Hope Bartholomew: Time for your medication, Ethel.
Ethel Janowski: I don't want any damn pills. I want a snack, Granny!

Movie Connections:

Features Criminally Insane (1975)

Two, two, two movies in one!!

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.