Director: Morgan J. Freeman
Screenplay: Alex Sanger and Karen Craig
Cast: Mila Kunis as Rachael Newman; William
Shatner as Starkman; Geraint Wyn Davies as Daniels; Robin Dunne as Brian; Lindy
Booth as Cassandra; Charles Officer as Keith
A Night of a Thousand
Horror (Movies) #181
Can you spell "donation"? He can't.
This is one of those sequels that, if not forgotten to history, does with context cause one to scratch your head about its existence. Mind that sacred cows do not really exist - even outside of horror cinema, if Citizen Kane (1941) had not had a follow on, Casablanca (1942) did have a 1983 one season series with David Soul as Rick Blaine and a young Ray Liotta in a minor role. The Birds (1963) got a 1994 TV sequel, and some horror films just had sequels, straight to video sequels (as in this case), or with a film like Psycho (1960) even a one-off, a shot-by-shot remake in 1996 as strange as that sounds. American Psycho II is an odd duck in that Lionsgate, after the 2000 adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho, a notorious novel in his career that whose film adaptation was by Mary Harron, they decided to make a film in name only. Not surprisingly, when you learnt that this was originally a script called The Girl Who Wouldn't Die1, only into production being moulded hastily into a sequel to the other film2, this belongs to a strange world of titles rewritten to rely on a previous production.
That and, in the opening and from behind, rather than hire Christian Bale again, they kill off Patrick Bateman, the novel and film's original protagonist, by having the new lead, as a young girl, off him and then grow up to be Mila Kunis. There is an obvious issue here that, with a huge spoiler for the original film, the ending of American Psycho has it likely that Bateman was deluding himself into believing he was murdering people, that immediately raises questions about the reality of this film. [Spoilers End]. The other is that, with that title, I was expecting something much campier and weird than what I got, but I will elaborate on that concern when I get to the film itself.
This is where things get interesting and controversial too, as all the time spent to get to this film, and that it was considered dreadful, American Psycho II is not that bad. More controversially, I say this as someone, willing to revisit the original, who during the times over years I saw the original American Psycho did not hold it as a great film. Opinion can change, and its worthy of re-evaluation as long I can contrast it to the novel, but one of the issues was that, whilst the decision by Harron to make it a parody of male chauvinism in the eighties was inspired, with her screenwriter Guinevere Turner, it was a great film, with exceptional scenes like business men comparing business fards to the Huey Lewis and the News sequence, prevented from becoming that film due to an anti-climatic and flat ending.
All American Girl is also not a satire. Here we are in the tail end of the late nineties slasher revival, with very little blood but a few fake corpses, no commentary but merely the tale of Rachael Newman. Having crossed paths with Patrick Bateman, she wishes to become an FBI agent, studying criminal intelligence in university, to effective become the TV series character Dexter before that character and show existed, wanting to pick off killers in the Bureau. Even if it means picking off competition first, her narration when she begins the film immediately sets off that she has ego, self delusion and a sense of already over the tipping point.
The logic of the film is confused, but it is a clear sense of humour to the material. Considering, getting her first victim, she fakes microwaving her cat to set a trap for her, though said scene is still likely to offend some, you get the tone immediately it is after. There is awareness and some white, especially as Kunis as Newman (including her monologue narration) is streaked in egotism and delusion, but sounds like a high school drama lead having growing pains.
Kunis does help a lot; perpetually youthful, it is amazing to think that her most known work would probably be voicing the character of Meg, the daughter of the family unit, in the animated series Family Guy, weirder as she replaced actress Lacey Chabert after Season One and was a replacement. Most of her career, baring Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (2010), is very commercial films I may never cover, a shame as between a fascinating life story, daughter of Ukrainian immigrant (during the Soviet era) who moved with her as a child, and had a career from childhood to adulthood in cinema between wrestler Hulk Hogan in Santa with Muscles (1996) to Aronofsky, she does have the kind of charismatic spark that would have been rewarding in weirder genre films. The scene, following Newman going to a psychologist Dr. Eric Daniels (Geraint Wyn Davies), letting him know how sad it will be for him as an older divorcee living with his mother and stagnating, possibly becoming like Ed Gein, shows the white she is capable of.
This is not a great horror film, but its reputation has been greatly exaggerated. The licensed music, mind, is probably the worst thing and it is dreadful, including the almost jokey instrumentals including country guitar riffs. Two songs have lyrics literally about being sad or bad or both - "Sad things have to happen. Bad things. Bad things. Sad things have to happen." - and they are so anaemic and dreadful, in a post-teen soap opera era and at the end of alt-rock/butt rock era, that it is unintentionally humorous.
The absurdity, or at least the humour, is felt with a sense that even though it could have been gorier, being of the post-Scream slashers it embraced the humour instead. This without even referring to William Shatner, who plays a criminologist who is now Newman's Behavioural Studies teacher, a great studier of serial killers who is dating one of his female students secretly. That is a creepy detail in the decades now past but not glossed over, made part of the fact his character is not the ideal man Newman has him as, as she herself is obsessed with him and getting promotion by him onto her wished course as an FBI agent. Shatner, having never grown up with his involvement in Star Trek baring that famous episode with him fighting the Gorn by throwing boulders at each other, is someone I have time for. His career is one hell of a career that is worthy for me to cover - with Roger Corman's The Intruder (1962), where he plays a racist fake preacher stirring up anti-civil rights emotions in the South, Shatner showed he could go act, but there are also bizarre work like Incubus (1966), an almost Ingmar Bergman like horror film entirely acted in Esperanto, or his directed episode of Perversions of Science (1997), a failed attempt to follow the success of the Tales from the Crypt series. He, as the "big get" as a name actor, does add a great deal to the film, though the film gets a nice twist in how someone else, the psychologist, goes from a jokey figure to a protagonist.
His character suggests what All American Girl should have been. In my mind, I had always pictured this infamous straight-to-video sequel and, with that subtitle especially, imaged a kitsch/gauche slasher with a tongue-in-cheek humour. Certainly something far more colourful in terms of aesthetic, as one of this film's flaws is how aesthetic muted the entire production is, perfunctory to say the least too in direction. Some of its humour does suggest the funnier perversion of its sacred prequel it could have been, as at the end you are introduced to a police officer fascinated by his specialist coffees imported from other countries and riding in the back seat of a cop car calculating the fine for speeding, but it never gets to that area. The characters can be so broad in this - like the male student who is going to have his rich father buy him his place in the FBI - that this campy version would have been better. Shatner's role in particular would have suited perfectly with this exact character he has already, the morally questionable lecturer he yet imbibes with interest, but that is a fictionalised ideal of this sequel, not the actual result we have.
Truthfully, I do not see the film sticking in my mind. The straight-to-video format, even long into the DVD and Blu-Ray period, is a strange where horror franchises can grow, have many sequels and even sequels decades later after dormancy, like the Deep Blue Sea series. They are also fraught with the dangers of thinking of economics rather than creativity, which can lead to very predictable stories. Some offer the promise of being bizarre or inspired, but most are just generic pulp. The comedy and moments of whit cover up how very predictable this film is, and that cannot be ignored. Try as I might, even if I was to tell the whole plot, as she picks through fellow students to a goal that gets compromised, a lot of the film is not even entertaining due to dialogue either but really the casting able to make scenes funnier or darker. This is really a case of a film where the fact I had to watch it twice to even create this review is softened by the fact it at least had a little bit of whit. That it originates not from the truly blasphemous idea of trying to make a sequel of American Psycho, but plastering the name over another film, is as disappointing as, actually, the idea of that scenario would have been compelling to picture if that was the plan from the start and lead to a final result.
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1) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jul/31/dvd-sequels-lost-boys-3
2) http://www.mtv.com/news/1501371/mila-kunis-career-thrives-despite-psycho-in-her-past/
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