Mirrors 2 – (Screamfest) Review

I never saw the original Mirrors. It came out while I was in college, during which I missed a lot of films due to my responsibilities as a student. From what I’ve heard however, I didn’t miss much and I’ve never had the desire to seek it out. With this in mind, I was really glad that Mirrors 2is more or less self contained. The only connection is that it takes place in the newly rebuilt department store that Kiefer Sutherland burned down in the last one. Unfortunately the film doesn’t do much to cement its own identity and becomes little more than a passable, yet easily forgettable DTV horror flick.

The Mayflower department store has been rebuilt and is about to have its Grand Reopening. The store’s owner Jack Matheson (William Katt) hires his questionably stable son Max (Nick Stahl) on as a security guard when the original guard quits after a ghastly experience with the demons in the mirror. Max begins seeing the ghost of a young girl in the mirrors around the store while his higher ups start getting killed off strangely. The cops think that Max is the one doing it and he has to escape capture while trying to figure out what happened to the girl.

The kills in the film are actually pretty good, the only problem is there aren’t enough. We get two awesome on screen deaths early on and then nothing until the final kill. It may have been a budget issue but damn it I wanted more. The effect are done by Greg Nicotero and it shows, as the unique deaths have some incredible gore. The first one is also preceded by some much appreciated nudity from the voice of Kim Possible, Christy Carlson Romano. Seeing her nude followed by her truly amazing death sequence was enough to make me give this flick high marks during the early parts of the film. Unfortunately everything falls through in the second half. We get one more kill and an attempted one that’s interrupted by Max but then we’re left with a boring and predictable mystery to solve. This decision is mind boggling because as soon as the movie changes gears we lose many of the characters anyway. The cops that are after Max disappear until the end and William Katt’s character also takes a hike. They could all have helped increase the lackluster body count but for whatever reason the film forgets about them with nary an explanation. This lack of gore in the second half is made worse with the final death of the film. We finally find out who killed the girl in the mirror and when it comes time for him to meet his maker he…dies off screen. That’s right the one guy we actually WANT to see meet his demise gets an off screen death, with our only indication to his fate being blood splatters on the mirror.

Mirrors 2 isn’t terrible, but it isn’t very good either. The goodwill it gets with the initial carnage is mostly squandered by the end of the film and what we’re left with is a very mundane “who-done-it” murder case. I’ve heard that this film follows the plot of the original Japanese film Into the Mirror more directly than its predecessor so if you’re a fan of that film this might interest you. Otherwise there are far better ways to spend 90 minutes.

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