CAUTION: Plot spoilers present.PR executive Holly Parker breaks up with her boyfriend & moves out of her shared apartment when she catches her best friend & co-worker Jan Lambert sleeping with him. She moves into the apartment of Tess Kositch, a painfully shy nurse who desperately needs a friend. But as soon as she settles in, Holly notices a strange number of behaviours with Tess, who has a history of convincing her friends to kill themselves in suicide pacts that she keeps getting out of. Tess also kills some of the patients in her care & frequents an underground S&M club. As Holly tries to come to terms with her new friend's lifestyle, Tess plans to drive Holly to suicide, first by killing off her friends.SINGLE WHITE FEMALE was a thriller that became a hit during the early 1990s – one of a number of psycho-thrillers that made their name at that time. Along with Basic Instinct & the bunny-boiler Fatal Attraction, Single White Female was part of a new era of thriller, which concerned itself less with traditional boogeymen & more with dangerously unstable female characters who latch onto their prey like a lion hunting a gazelle & wreak havoc in their target's families. Despite not exactly leaving the door open for a sequel, SWF somehow managed to spawn a direct-to-video sequel with Single White Female 2: The Psycho in 2005, a good thirteen years after the original came out.I had a sinking feeling when I hired the DVD & saw the names of Andy Hurst & Ross Helford on the sleeve as the writers – these two had made their name writing various sequels to the classic John McNaughton thriller WILD THINGS, which was actually a parody of the same kind of film that SWF belonged to. What works for a thriller parody doesn't quite work for a serious film like SWF 2. Needless to say, the film doesn't get very far.The main problem with a direct-to-video sequel such as SWF 2: The Psycho (yeah, I know, the title needed a lot more work) is that you're trying to hit a niche market – fans of early 1990s' psycho-thrillers, mainly – but by hiring a pair of writers who had made themselves known for their parodies of the very genre your film is in, the hope of a serious film goes right outside the window. Indeed most fans of the original film had trashed this sequel badly due to this very reason. But on the other side of the coin, the film emerges remarkably better than I had initially hoped would happen. Helford & Hurst actually manage to do something serious for a change, although they drop the numerous threesomes that come in their bread-&-butter scripts (the Wild Things sequels) & replace it with a much more restrained thriller. It is quite strange to see that with the original, Jennifer Jason Leigh & Bridget Fonda were already big stars when they started work on SWF, yet went ahead with baring their bodies – yet here, Kristen Miller & Allison Lange are complete unknowns but must have had 'no-nudity' clauses put into their contracts, judging by the fact that they both don't appear naked. I suspect that had they allowed themselves to appear starkers, they would have gotten more fans than what ultimately transpired here. Other than that, I had no problem with the acting.The story is another issue – I didn't buy the heroine's plight due to her character being a complete floozy – Kristen Miller's PR executive deliberately has sex with her client for a promotion yet dumps him when her friend & co-worker does it with him (something that would have worked better were this a Wild Things sequel) & goes through her new friend's personal belongings & spies on her. This I didn't like. Still, the film is not a total loss – the thriller mechanics, once they kick in, do the job reasonably. But as far as sequels go, Single White Female 2: The Psycho is far from what the original film deserved.

Single White Female 2: The Psycho is yet another entry into one of the more unfortunate genres of modern filmmaking - The Fraudulent Sequel. When you're in the video store and you find a movie on the shelf that proclaims itself as the sequel to a movie you have heard of but you say to yourself "I never knew they made another one of these"…odds are you're looking at a Fraudulent Sequel. These sort of movies are almost invariably horrible and this one is NOT an exception to that rule.If you've seen the original Single White Female then you know what this story is about because it's exactly the same, just a very crappy version of it. Two women move in together and one of them turns out to be violently insane. I'm not going to bother going into the plot any more than that because I'm not joking, this is virtually a carbon copy of the first film, so if you've already seen it there's no need for me to repeat what you already know. If you haven't seen Single White Female, I don't want to ruin it for you by putting any of this movie's stink on it. Single White Female is a decent flick that's worth seeing. Single White Female 2: The Psycho is not.I suppose I could heap abuse on the pitiful acting, writing and direction that went into this cinematic sinkhole, but I think there is something good that can come out of film this bad. Let's take this as an opportunity to examine the two distinct varieties of the fraudulent sequel.One variety is the "bait-and-switch" sequel. That's where a studio finds an original script, makes a few very minor changes to it and then slaps a another movie's title on it. American Psycho 2 and White Noise 2 are examples of the "bait-and-switch" sequel. When watching those films it is nakedly apparent that they were not created to be sequels, but someone thought they could make a little more money by pretending otherwise. The "bait-and-switch" sequel usually makes a few references to the first film at the start, then goes on to tell a tale that has essentially nothing in common with the original. While these movies will be disappointing to viewers expecting an actual sequel, beyond that it's a crap shoot. Sometimes the "bait-and-switch" movie is actually okay and would have been better standing on its own. White Noise 2 is like that. But sometimes the "bait-and-switch" flick is awful and desperately needs to exploit the name of another movie or no one would ever watch it. American Psycho 2 is like that.Single White Female 2: The Psycho is the other variety of fraudulent sequel. You could call it a "forced remake". That's when a studio takes an original screenplay, or at least the essential structure of an original screenplay, cuts out 90% of it and then splices whatever is left into a nearly point-by-point duplicate of another story. It's the same characters doing the same things in the same situations as the first film, they just have different names and there are one or two new wrinkles left over from the initial script. "Forced remakes" uniformly suck because people with talent and skill won't make them. Just like in school, only gigantic losers blatantly copy other people's work. That means you end up watching the same story you've seen before, just told poorly.The only marginally entertaining thing about "forced remakes" is that, because there's usually multiple writers involved, you can try and pick out where one writer's work ends and another begins. For example, the first half of this film starts out by obviously trying to keep us guessing as to which of the female roommates is the crazy one. The second half of the film totally abandons that approach for no particular reason at all. It's clear that the person who wrote the first half was trying to be clever and the person who wrote the second half wasn't. Then there's a moment when the crazy woman is suddenly revealed to be one of those "angel of mercy" serial killers that murder sick old people. It's a revelation straight out of the blue that doesn't fit in with anything else in the story. That's clearly a remnant of the original script that survived when it was gutted and turned into a "forced remake".Single White Female 2: The Psycho is lamely written, acted and directed. It's level of violence is corny and the only women who get naked in it are generic extras. Don't be defrauded by this movie.

Recap: Two career-minded young and successful women, Holly and Jan, live together but compete for everything. The promotion at the job and even more importantly perhaps, boyfriends. No rules apply and Holly flees the apartment after Jan tricked her out of town during a important business meeting and then seduced Holly's new boyfriend. Holly moves in with Tess, a vulnerable young woman that soon take a liking to Holly. Too much perhaps, because soon Tess copies Holly clothes, hair color and starts appearing at her job. All the while Tess tries to force Holly to break with her former friend Tess seem more and more manipulative.Comments: A rather poor attempt to make a psychological thriller. Unfortunately it seems they forgot to bring the psychological element and seem content that the audience will keep watching just because all the leads are young and beautiful actresses. It doesn't work.To add a psychological level to any movie you need suspense to go with some really well written and developed characters. Relationships need to be given time to be established and to evolve slowly, to seem really plausible. This movie gives the opposite. There is no depth to the characters. Each and every one of the three leads are shallow, manipulative egoistic and it is hard to sympathize even with the heroine. Neither of them is very friendly, even to their good friends. Also the relationships develop without cause or explanation, it looks more like temporary alliances and feuds that start and end with a single word.The story is also predictable on a level that even the heroine should see what is happening. It annoys me that she suddenly trusts her new roommate (Tess), whom she has known all of a few days, more than old friends when Tess accuses them of having tried to take advantage of her. Why would she do that if she had any real connection with any other person? No, this movie doesn't work, at all. Sure, I can see that the women are beautiful, but that doesn't make a movie. And it is far too little when you try to build something deep and intriguing out of thin air.3/10

SINGLE WHITE FEMALE 2: THE PSYCHO is in the same line of the first movie. The plot is similar, the characters are a bit different, settings too, but what really changes is the end and the way the plot gets its final disclosures.In a certain way I think the first movie is better well done, because the plot flows more naturally and nothing seems to be forced, unlike this sequel, where some scenes seemed to be jumped just to be similar to the first movie (The scene where TESS paints her hair to red. It came out of nowhere - because they didn't almost even relate – just to be close to the first movie. The bar scene either, but here I must say the scene in the sequel was better done). But on the other hand I enjoyed more the answers given to this plot and the open ending this story has.I must say I appreciated this kind of philosophical speech about the act of dying told by TESS: "There's a moment, just before the end... a moment of clarity, where all it finally seems to make sense. I saw it in the ELIZABETH's eyes. I want it for me." It seems a bit disturbing, but I found some deepness in these words! This sequel might be a low cost production (it is for sure) but in my perspective it's not worse than the first movie. Also, it's probably more suspenseful, but here also contributes the soundtrack, which is more effective providing suspense to the film.It was a good surprise, since I was expecting something worse...