Screamers 2: The Hunting (2009)

Director: Sheldon Wilson

Starring: Gina Holden, Greg Bryk

Run Time: 95 mins

Certificate: 18

 

Plot Outline: A distress signal is received from Sirius 6B, previously thought to have become a lost colony after the screamers wiped out the human population, and a team is sent to investigate and retrieve any survivors. The team only has a small window in which to conduct any rescue as a meteor storm is heading to destroy the planet. When they arrive, they find that the screamers have evolved into something much more sinister and much more deadly.

The Review: The current trend for random sequels to long-forgotten films continues with Screamers 2: The Hunting. The original Screamers is something of a minor cult classic featuring Peter Weller and a host of spherical killer machines. It didn't do that well when it got released and has long been consigned to the vaults. I didn't think it was that good in all honesty - there was a good film waiting to come out but it was too talky and dragged too much to be consistently entertaining. It had a decent enough plot to carry the film and was helped by a strong performance by Peter Weller. This is exactly the opposite - it's a lot faster paced, has more action, more gore and is generally more exciting but features less talented actors, a half-assed story and as many clichés as you can shake a stick at.

Screamers 2: The Hunting sticks rigidly to the classic Aliens formula about a group of soldiers being sent to a remote planet where they're all killed off. If you've seen one "group of people getting picked off by something deadly" feature then you've seen them all unfortunately. You'll know who is going to live and die - the token expendable black guy makes an appearance here! Two crew members decide to have sex for no other reason than to provide the film with it's token love scene. There are characters who do silly things to further the plot. There are other characters who hide secrets from everyone else which is a tad annoying given that the secrets always make things worse at the wrong moment. I'll at least give the film credit for trying to stick as close to the original as possible in terms of continuation. This feels more like a proper follow-up which builds on the original as opposed to a shameless sequel that literally remakes the original with a lower budget. It has the same vibe as the original and uses similar settings and sets. Clearly we get the sense that this is still the same planet. The screamers, in their original form, look as unique and deadly as always. They whizz through the ground in packs to attack and then fly through the air, slicing and dicing their victims until they've been shredded to pieces. Needless to say this leads to plenty of gore and dismemberment - I'm actually quite pleased by the amount of blood on display here. The first part of the film continues along the same lines as the original with the soldiers and screamers doing battle numerous times, resulting in lots of firefights and explosions. It's all a bit too routine for my liking. The new version of the screamers taking human form seems to be that good old chestnut of writers taking an easy (and cheaper) route by having their screen menace played by humans instead of costly special effects. The change between small spherical objects into tall humans seems a little far fetched and the film doesn't do a good job of explaining the miraculous change in physics. The human screamers tend to stay human a lot of the time but when they do reveal themselves, at least the make-up effects are convincing enough. I believe there was little CGI, if any, used in these close-ups of the mandibles and mechanical jaws opening. The film shifts from action to more horror-orientated when the human screamers are revealed too which makes a nice change of pace.