If you loved "Henry - Portrait of a Serial Killer", you may hate this terrible sequel. There is nothing here to recommend. Director Chuck Parello, who also made a more recent Ed Gein film (not quite as awful, but almost), has no idea how to make a good movie. This hopeless bore is a series of badly staged murders. There is no energy, no characterization, and no horror. I wanted to like this, I really did, but by the time it hit the one hour mark, I was having trouble stopping myself from turning the TV off. Of course, in the interests of forming a fair opinion, I needed to see it out to the end. Michael Rooker was wise not to return for this hideous failure.

When this came out I scoffed (yes, scoffed) and saved myself the headache of watching a lame sequel to one of my favorite grim horror flicks. But a few year later I found myself enjoying the Ed Gein biopic by the same director, so I decided to give his "Henry 2: Mask of Sanity" a spin. It's a decidedly mediocre effort, not as terrible as I expected but no where near as good as it should've been.There's a different actor playing Henry, apparently because Michael Rooker was busy making "Mallrats 3: Beyond Thunderdome". Baby-faced Neil Giuntoli is acceptable, but not nearly as menacing, and I laughed out loud when he yelled "DO YOU WANNA DIE?" at his erstwhile partner, Kai (Rich Komenich). Henry meets Kai at the port-a-john center where they work. I was thrilled to see Henry enter the exciting world of port-a-john maintenance, what with it's inherent glitziness and intrigue, but the movie soon abandons that avenue to concentrate on Henry & Kai's exploits as hired pyromaniacs and their adventures in white trash sub-suburbia. The fire scenes are all pretty dull, and the eventual murders are also uninvolving, though there's lots of fake fighting, if that's your thing . There are no scenes near the chilling level of the video-taped rape in the first "Henry". One murder features a too-goofy decapitation that's more on the level of a Frank Hennenlotter flick. Plus, I don't buy Kai immediately buying into Henry's murder spree. Otis from "Henry 1" was a much better sidekick. There are other lame scenes, like the one where Henry's boss drugs Henry's beer. Instead of showing what a psycho killer might see while on acid, the movie just has Henry get all red faced and leave the room. The best scenes concern the relationship between Henry and Kai's mentally unbalanced niece (Carri Levinson). I thought she was just going to be the standard stock horror movie "mousey girl" character, but she's actually a pretty well-drawn love interest for Henry, and contributes to the surprising ending. I also liked the scene where she showed Henry her artwork and gets him to draw a picture.I didn't totally hate this movie, I just wish it was 77% better. It doesn't have the sense of urgency the first one here, and the script leaves much to be desired. Maybe this can just be a brief stop-over on Henry's quest to becoming a great, franchised film villain. He learned a lot of useful skills in this flick, so hopefully he can apply them in a third, more serious and dark movie. I mean, if anyone wants to give me the money, I'll make it. I'm right here if you need me. It's okay, I'll wait.

Well, the original Henry is my all-time favorite movie, so I didn't think that a sequel could match it, and I was right. However, Henry 2 is not a bad film. It took two viewings, but the second time I enjoyed it much more because I was able to resist comparing it to the original. Henry 2 sucks by comparison, but if viewed as-is, it's perfectly capable of standing on its own. Michael Rooker is also my favorite actor, so I was not surprised to read many harsh critiques of Neil Guintoli's performance as Henry. It seems to me that, while no one could have played Henry better than Rooker, Neil Guintoli was a great substitute and should be recognized for that.

I had no intention of seeing this piece of schlock, but finally caved into temptation. I had to see why anyone would bother to make a sequel to a film that obviously did not need one (much like Jaws), well I did not expect much and got even less. This film is a gratuitous waste of time that has nothing like the intensity of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Henry was not a slasher film, it is human portrait, better yet a sort of cynical comment on films about real people. Henry Lee Lucas was a real person, but certainly not the type of person that has any right being venerated in film. Even if he did not kill all of the people that he claimed to, he is still a degenerate who has still killed.This film was a meditation on the type of mind that can do these horrible things, it is a commentary on the evil in man's heart. Henry was not exploitive in any way (which is why I object to it being placed in the Horror section at video stores and its being referred to as a Slasher film), it was grim and unpleasantly realistic. It did not attempt to be entertaining, whereas this pathetic sequel does, it tries to portray Henry as a slasher or a character rather than the simple, banal evil of the original film. I am completely baffled by the fact that this film was ever made and what possibly could have motivated it (well, money of course, but thats not an excuse).