MIRRORS 2

Boy and girl drive through the rain one night. He takes his eye off the road momentarily to gaze lovingly into her eyes. And then ... Crash!

The boy concerned is Max (Nick Stahl), and he's been driving himself crazy over his role in his fiancée's death ever since. So crazy, in fact, that each time he looks in a mirror, he doesn't "even know what's real anymore".

What he needs, perhaps, is a new job to keep his mind occupied. As luck would have it, a vacancy is about to come up at the local soon-to-be-opened-to-the-public Mayflower department store: the night watchman Henry (Evan Jones) meets a very sticky end in front of a figure-length mirror there.

Max's dad Jack (William Katt) runs the store and immediately calls his son with the offer of the job, having believed Henry to have gone crazy and cut himself to pieces. Max, reluctantly, takes the job.

Jack greets Max on his first morning at work and introduces him to his closest colleagues: financial advisor Keller (Lawrence Turner), head buyer Jenna (Christy Carlson Romano) and vice president Ryan (Jon Michael Davis).

It's not long before Max discovers a full-length mirror upstairs and a mysterious grey apparition appears in it. The image of a woman in distress, it sufficiently creeps Max out to the point where he flees back to his psychiatrist and tells her all about it. Unfortunately, she just thinks he's back on the "drugs and alcohol".

He, and we, know better. Max may be a little fruity, but there really is something in that dastardly mirror. This is reinforced when he receives a grisly vision of Jenna through the mirror, and then learns of her unfortunate shower mishap the morning after. And she's just the first of several Mayflower employees to die in mysterious ways shortly after meeting Max, in similar ways to visions presented to him through the mirror.

Of course, it's only a matter of time until pasty-faced night-watchman Max attracts unwanted attention from a couple of investigating detectives, who begin to suspect that he may be behind the dodgy deaths.

Can Max solve the mystery of the white-eyed girl behind the mirror and prevent any more deaths, before he ends up being convicted as a murderer? And, what will pretty local girl Elizabeth (Emmanuelle Vaugier) ultimately have to do with all of this?

That most unenviable of tasks, directing an unnecessary sequel to an unwanted remake, was handed to Victor Garcia. His previous form includes RETURN TO HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL and the "Blood Trails" mini-series, a television offshoot of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT.

It's a job many wouldn't thank you for and it seems inevitable that MIRRORS 2 will soon disappear under a dismissive wave of critical indifference and/or scalding. After all, Alexander Aja's MIRRORS - a remake of the acclaimed Asian horror INTO THE MIRROR - doesn't have many fans.

But Garcia hasn't done a bad job here. Matt Venne's screenplay is by-the-numbers and the cast aren't the most charismatic, nor is the budget one of those that is going to slap your face with stunning visuals, but the director at least keeps what he does have ticking over nicely.

At 86 minutes in length, MIRRORS 2 is thankfully to-the-point and doesn't entertain pointless sub-plots or exposition: it sticks to its game at all times.

Though highly unoriginal - as well as harking back to INTO THE MIRROR, there are shades of STIR OF ECHOES and the ELM STREET films in here - it does at least provide a likeable enough lead in Stahl, and a regular supply of gory set-pieces for us to enjoy. There are bare breasts, bloody decapitations, disembowelment, ghostly goings-on ... in other words, all the traits of a good exploitation horror film.

Well-shot, well lit, sharply edited and commendably straight-faced, MIRRORS 2 is not a great horror film, but is perfectly acceptable Saturday night DVD fare. It's untaxing, fairly stylish and - if you can excuse the occasional CGI - very gory at times.

MIRRORS 2 is presented uncut in its original aspect ratio, and is enhanced for 16x9 television sets. It's a good presentation, handling the darker scenes deftly with very little compression concerns and sharp images elsewhere. Colours are muted, deliberately so, and flesh-tones take on a natural hue.

English 5.1 audio is solid and well balanced throughout. Optional subtitles are provided in English for the Hard of Hearing, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish.

The disc opens with a 5-minute showcase for 20th Century Fox's range of blu-ray (DIE HARD 4.0, THE SIMPSONS MOVIE - nothing exciting) which leads to a static main menu page.

From there, a static scene-selection menu allows access to the film via 24 chapters.

Extras are limited to two featurettes looking behind the scenes. "The Other Side" is a 9-minute Making Of which intersperses limited on-set footage with self-congratulatory talking head interviews with various bespectacled cast and crewmembers.

"Keeping It Real" is better; a 12-minute expose on how the gory FX were produced, looking into green-screen effects, prosthetics and good old acting.

Finally we get three deleted scenes, totalling 2 minutes in length. They throw in a tad more angst, a little more gore - but nothing that damages the final cut.

MIRRORS 2 is not a classic, nor is it the abomination I'd feared. It's okay, like a US TV drama stretched to feature-length and peppered with enjoyable gore. The shower scene, which incorporates a fantastic female figure and a show-stopping beheading, is almost worth the price of admission on its own.

Review by Stuart Willis