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 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...

How does that line in "Henry VIII I Am" go? Oh, yeah: "Second verse...same as the first!" When the movie first started, I thought Burns' character was going to be the bad girl in here, as she's done before, but that she wasn't was the only mild surprise in this film. If you've seen the original with Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh, you're not missing much by skipping this film. I noticed it was so bad, it was never even released theatrically in the US! The girls are all pretty, but the film is pretty predicable.Save yourself the trouble and rent the first one on DVD! Like I stated in the summary, 2 out of 10 stars is a gift to this film. I'm actually surprised that I couldn't wait for this movie to end so I could end up trashing it like I've done..and if you've ever read any of my other reviews, you'd see that it would take a lot for me to trash something like this. Unfortunately, I can't find one thing to save this movie.

I'm not exactly sure of the reasoning behind the subtitle "The Psycho"...a tad unnecessary if you ask me. Then again, so is the whole movie.This "sequel" takes place in the big busy city where two roommates/business partners eventually clash, forcing one to move out and (if you didn't see this coming like a freight train) into the apartment of a lonely quiet girl who turns out to be an obsessive nut case (with an appreciation for S&M...hmm). This movie is pretty much the same as the original, save for some different plot twists and turns here and there that lead up to what might be the most boring climax in movie history, taking place in an apartment building hallway. What fun.I agree with what one person said about the "psycho's" wig in the first part of the movie being terrible, but what was worse was the wretched black bob wig worn by the main character's ex-roommate in an attempt to make her look sexy and exotic...needless to say, if Drew Barrymoore's character in SCREAM had an evil twin, she would look like this...