WITCHBOARD 2: THE DEVIL'S DOORWAY
Dolenz-ariffic. At least there's no Monkees songs.
It's a good thing that Ami Dolenz is cute, because her acting is SO SO SO bad. She appears to have inherited pretty much all of her father's talent.
The frustratingly clothed Dolenz stars as a would-be artist who moves into a loft and finds (surprise) a Ouija board, with which she promptly contacts the loft's previous tenant, the since-deceased Susan, who has a number of creepy secrets of her own.
The original Witchboard was mostly remarkable for having Tawny Kitaen in the shower - but then, so was my 1995 New Year's party. (just kidding, Tawny, you actually-believe-OJ-is-innocent freak) Lacking that kind of much-missed sexploitation, the sequel mostly relies on a (sort-of) plot, and a lot of really nifty camerawork from director Kevin Tenney.
The plot's okay, nothing special, and the acting is pretty much what you'd expect (although it was nice to see one character who was set up to be a total asshole actually acting like an intelligent person throughout the film, more or less). And like I said, there's entirely too much clothing here.
But I dunno, something about this was reasonably diverting; there were a few shots which made me go "Cool!" and rewind it so I could watch 'em again, and there's some laughs, and an amusing sequence (an obvious homage to the Phantasm films) where a spinning buzzsaw blade chases one guy around. (I also liked a scene were a wrecking ball smashed one unlucky character and a van - we're given a ball's-eye-view)
Worth watching for Tenney's directorial energy and inventiveness, but there's not really much else here. He also wrote the (heh) script; I'm curious as to what he can do with a good one.