For the second of our 2000s DTV sequels of 90s thrillers, we have this sequel to Wild Things, the late 90s flick featuring Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Matt Dillon, and a full-frontal Kevin Bacon. Unfortunately, because this didn't have Kevin Bacon, we know going in we're at least not going to get that full-frontal action, so at best this will be a three star film. In addition to us, Mitch at the Video Vacuum and Tars Tarkas have covered this as well.
Wild Things 2 has Susan Ward as a star beach volleyball player for her local high school, and the step-daughter of a rich guy, meaning she stands to inherit a lot of money now that her mom is no longer with us. The fly in the ointment is Leila Arcieri, who doesn't like Ward, and when Ward's step-father bites it in a plane accident, she comes forward and says she's his illegitimate daughter, meaning she should get the inheritance. Turns out, after a DNA test, she is the daughter? That's when insurance investigator Isaiah Washington gets involved, and he has a hunch something's fishy about the whole thing. But can he resist the allure of the money and these two beautiful... high school kids?
While this isn't a Gus Van Sant shot-by-shot remake of Psycho-style remake, it is pretty much a remake of the first movie. What do you do with that then? I means we know what's going to happen at every stage, every twist, especially at the end when you need your eye protection as the loose ends start flying together and the twists come fast and furious (Vin Diesel style). It's too bad, because I think as a guilty pleasure DTV thriller, this could've worked if they'd decided to try some new stuff with the story. The Ward-Arcieri interplay loses its intrigue when it devolves into the same relationship Campbell and Richards hard; and Isaiah Washington's character becomes too one-note when he starts to turn from insurance investigator who smells a rat, to guy who just wants the money. And in that sense, the same way that people were like "why would you make a shot-by-shot remake of Psycho, Mr. Van Sant?" we can't help watching this and thinking "why couldn't you have zagged just a bit from the first film?" With so many Noir-ish thrillers to pull from, like Double Indemnity, that would've been perfect for this, it's a shame they didn't go there. Just the same, as a free streamer and a 90-minute time killer, this does fit the guilty pleasure bill.
This is our first time seeing Susan Ward on here, which was surprising, until I saw that she'd retired from acting in 2012, which, between then and now, would've been prime DTV movie making for her. I first remember her as the innocent girl from Kansas, complete with the Rachel haircut, on Sunset Beach, and while I think she would've been looking for more from that, sometimes Soap Opera to DTV/TV movie isn't a bad deal. It's interesting, because in our last review we were talking about the ecosystem that Wild Things helped create, and Cruel Intentions helped make a staple of the late 90s, and Ward was in The In Crowd, playing a role Sarah Michelle Gellar turned down, and unfortunately it was at that moment where that kind of thing had hit its saturation point--which seems crazy considering it was only a year after Cruel Intentions, but no one saturates the market like Hollywood does. And sometimes it's that simple, the role Sarah Michelle Gellar turns down ends up being a dud, and four years later you're doing Wild Things 2, and eight years later it's not getting better, you have a choice to make. Robin Dunne chose to lean into it, and Susan Ward chose to retire. As far as this film, she wasn't bad here, and I think would've good been in a Robin Dunne-esque career, but I also don't blame her for calling it a day too.
Unlike Ward, who hadn't been on the site before, this is the fourth time for Leila Arcieri, even though I didn't remember the other three times. The first one was the PM flick Hot Boyz, which, with all the names in that, I could be forgiven for missing her there; and the other two were Death Toll and Supreme Champion, and considering those were both so unremarkable, I could be forgiven for forgetting she was in either of those too. But like Ward, she's also retired from acting, in her case two years earlier in 2010, and I can't blame her either based on the kinds of roles she was getting. According to IMDb, she won an award at the Brooklyn Film Festival for Buffalo Bushido in 2009, and as far as I can tell, that film wasn't released, at least not widely enough. Couple that with having to take a film like Supreme Champion right after that, and that's probably enough for an agonizing reappraisal of the situation. And I don't know that a movie like this helps either. She did have a body double for the topless scenes, but even without that, overall her character is written as this one-note, "ethnic" antagonist to Ward, and as much as she tried to punch it up in her performance, there was probably also a sense of "this is what Hollywood thinks of me?" And it's too bad, because even a slightly more imaginative script could've given her more to work with, and I think she would've rewarded that imagination in her performance.
We always joke about how old the high schoolers are in movies like this, and this film is no different, with Ward 28 and Arcieri 31 when the film came out. I get why they do that--if they have a love scene with 41-year-old Isaiah Washington, you can't have an actual high school-aged actress in that role. But the thing is, even if the actors are that much older, they're still playing high school students, and which makes the whole thing kind of weird. At least in Cruel Intentions, other than the assistant principal or whatever who was hooking up with Amy Adams's character--and that was fully depicted as a bad thing--at least the characters who were adults playing high school kids were only hooking up with each other, as opposed to here. And I think the only reason why they set this in high school was because the first one was, which to me isn't enough of a reason to do it again--in fact, it would've been a better zag on the first one, right? Make them college students instead of high school students, and then add in some of those other elements I discussed, and we could've had something more than just a 90-minute DTV guilty pleasure time killer.
Finally, as I mentioned above, we had some beach volleyball in this. It was the most haphazard, cobbled-together, after-thought beach volleyball, where the kids in the high school just run across the street to the beach and play the game, with no coach or anything--it was almost surreal in its goofiness. I think this is the fourth time we've had beach volleyball here on the site. The first was the C. Thomas Howell classic Side Out, which if you haven't seen, it's a must; the second was Beach Kings aka Green Flash, where David Charvet plays a college basketball star who decides to try his hand at beach volleyball, a film that also had The Hills's Kristin Cavallari, which dovetails nicely with the third film, Into the Blue 2: The Reef, which had some beach volleyball in it, and featured another The Hills star, Audrina Patridge. While I do enjoy watching volleyball and I have fun playing it at a cookout, it's not like I'm a fan to the point that I can name famous players or anything, so I'm not sure why beach volleyball keeps coming up on the site. Do I need to start tagging it?
We'll leave that question for another time and wrap this baby up. Currently you can get this on Tubi, but between when I saw this and wrote the review, it was already taken down once, so who knows how long it'll stay. It's too much of an unimaginative remake of the first one to be really great, but it could get you to the church on time if you need to kill some time for 90 minutes.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365270/
Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/
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