Honestly, I’m cool with direct-to-video horror sequels. What they lack in big-name stars, they make up for in gore. See Wrong Turn 3, 30 Days of Night: Dark Days and, now, Mirrors 2.
Looking like Dexter‘s little brother, Nick Stahl plays Max, still grieving over the car-crash death of his fiancé. His dad (William Katt) hires him to be the night watchman of his soon-to-open upscale department store. He’ll be replacing the one whose mirror image happily chewed broken glass, causing his own face and mouth to be cut up.
And so it goes that upper management get killed as they watch their mirror images do gruesome things, such as slicing their own tendons. The best death scene comes when Christy Romano (formerly Disney’s squeaky-clean Kim Possible) meets a really bloody death in the shower after soaping up her new, ugly fake boobs.
While the first half plays like Final Destination in the creative deaths department, the second finds Max and second-half love interest Emmanuelle Vaugiér attempting to solve the riddle behind these gruesome shenanigans. Maybe it makes more sense if you’ve seen the first Mirrors; I haven’t. As director, DTV vet Victor García (Return to House on Haunted Hill) brings visual class to these proceedings, yielding a satisfying fright flick, even if it’s completely void of frights (Katt’s middle-age ponytail notwithstanding). —Rod Lott
I think back in the EVEN STEVENS days if anyone suggested that the dorky brother would become a blockbuster superstar and the hot sister would be doing nude shower scenes in low-budget DTV horror sequels, they’d probably just shrug and say “Man, show business is FUCKED UP!”
Not only that, but back then, she used to be cute and he used to be appealing.
Having seen MIRRORS I can’t imagine that anything revealed during its excruciating running time would be helpful here.