Directed by Victor Garcia. Starring Nick Stahl, Emmanuelle Vaugier, Stephanie Honore, Christy Romano, William Katt, Lawrence Turner, Wayne Pere. Horror USA 90 mins Certificate : 18

Release Date 24th January 2011.

If you attended Frightfest 2008 and survived to the end, chances are you will have fond memories of sharing several guffaws with a few hundred other fans over Alexandra Aja’s misguided but loveably duff MIRRORS. Though played as a sincere remake of the eerie Korean horror INTO THE MIRROR, the flick swiftly descended into the realm of unintended mirth thanks to a godawful script and an insane performance by the nun-threatening Kiefer Sutherland that suggested no one told him he was on a break from 24. Someone, somewhere must have made money from this farrago, because MIRRORS 2 has arrived, it’s acting more like a remake than a sequel and - surprise! - it’s actually a better movie all round…albeit one with a lot less laughs.

Director Victor Garcia, whose C.V. lists the misbegotten RETURN TO HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, here works from an efficient script by Matt Venne, whose highest-profile genre work to date was as scribe for another surprisingly good genre sequel, the conceptually similar WHITE NOISE : THE LIGHT. This one has no allegiance to the Aja flick other than bearing its title, and its central Korean influence, though it does revolve around another night security guard at a new Mayflower department store, this one in New Orleans.

A suitably haunted looking Nick Stahl takes the lead as the son of the store’s owner, played by William Katt - who sports an even more embarrassing hairdo than the understandably naff 70’s one he sported in CARRIE all those decades ago. Stahl takes over nightshift duties after the previous watchman suffers a messy “accident” and subsequently blames an assortment of mirror-based creepy visions on the trauma he suffered from a road smash that killed his fiancée (and, for a few seconds, himself). Stahl, who never quite delivered on his early promise despite a few appearances in huge Hollywood flicks, has a largely reactive role and gets to say Only-In-Movies things like “I’m not crazy” while an unravelling back-story involving the grim fate of Emmanuelle Vaugier’s store-working sister explains the supernatural reasons responsible for his visions and a mounting death toll.

It’s no world-beater, MIRRORS 2. It has the expected array of dopey hand-on-shoulder false scares and loud musical stings to accompany the real shocks just in case they failed to make you jump. There’s a dumb shrink character who chips in with some chatter about the Korean myth of a person’s soul becoming trapped within the mirror world just to remind us of this project’s origins… though her role is as goofily written as a pair of silly homicide detectives. And the ultimate revelation about the female spirit wont be a surprise to anyone who has had only a passing flirtation with J horror over the past two decades.

All that said, the movie is much more effective and stylish than your rock-bottom expectations will lead you to believe. It’s good looking, the original score by Frederik Wiedmann wouldn’t shame an above-par theatrical genre release and director Garcia does a fine job at maximising the eerie potential of the mirror-land concept, especially during an impressively designed sequence that takes us behind the glass.

Best of all, the movie, which subtly integrates CG into its practical FX work, boasts a vivid quotient of splatter courtesy of the KNB boys. There’s a bout of nasty glass-eating and a graphic bit of business involving mirror-induced Achilles tendon severing, though the highlight involves the lovely Christy Romano taking a marvellously gratuitous shower that culminates in a bloody decapitation almost worthy of vintage Argento.

Extras : Visual / Make-up Effects featurette, making of featurette, trailer and brief deleted scenes reel.

Steven West

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