The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

When I hear or read of an Asylum movie sequel, I immediately think considering The Asylum's notoriously bad reputation that this is not going to be good. Imagine my surprise when I found myself enjoying Killers 2. It is not perfect, a few of the fight scenes are poorly choreographed and shot, some of the humour felt out of place considering the scenario, Steven Glinn's character is unbearably obnoxious and the cat fight shower scene between the "hot girls" added nothing to the story other than to perhaps bring some conflict between a prominent Asylum movie cliché. However, generally Killers 2 is crisp and clean, with more subtle lighting tricks and less claustrophobic-feeling photography and more of a sense of confinement. The scene where the lead character literally loses it is wonderfully surreal. The direction is generally good, a big improvement over the execrable Scarecrow Slayer, the confinement is menacing, some of the film has a sense of intimacy and while there is atmosphere it was a good idea to have it as like a stark atmosphere rather than the in-your-face sort that you get a lot. Apart from some misplaced humour, the script is vibrantly sharp and brutally shocking, while the story never bored me, didn't feel too predictable or implausible and most of all it was suspenseful and had a frightening intensity to it. The characters on the most part are types of characters that we see a lot from time to time, but a big attempt is made to make them have more than one sides to their personality instead of being one-sided and annoying. Only Steven Glinn's character belongs in the latter category, so much so you actually long for his depth. The acting I was also surprised by, Kim Little is unbelievably good in the lead, entirely believable as delicate, desperate, dangerous and deceptive. DC Douglas is frighteningly confident in his arrogance, while Melissa Renee Martin's brief appearance is quite a scene stealer. All in all, enjoyable and for The Asylum I found it a decent movie. 6/10 Bethany Cox

Some films are more enlightening than they are entertaining. Let me tell you what I learned from watching Killers II: The Beast.1. There's a movie out there called Killers.2. Someone decided that movie deserved a sequel.3. That person is an imbecile.4. The only research Paul Bales did before writing this script was watching Girl, Interrupted, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and old episodes of The Incredible Hulk TV show starring Bill Bixby.5. Bales apparently believes you can dispense with a little thing called plot and just have a 65 minute prologue to a 22 shootout.6. Director David Michael Latt has seen at least one John Woo movie.7. Latt is smart enough to know you can use slow motion to disguise a fight scene that's so poorly choreographed and performed it would look like a 6th grade slap fight at normal speed.8. The "No naked chicks in a low budget R rated flick" rule remains valid.Let me stop for a second and explain that one. If you're making a low budget, R-rated thriller, action or horror movie, your script probably wasn't written by Shakespeare and your director probably isn't the second coming of John Ford. You've got little money to work with and likely not much more experience, talent or skill. But the one thing every low budget, R-rated film can offer is women taking their clothes off. I'm not talking about making a skinflick. I'm talking about having some gratuitous nudity in between characters getting punched, shot, blown up, crucified or what have you. There's never a shortage of pretty and naïve young women willing to bare it all for a shot at stardom and no reason a filmmaker shouldn't take advantage of that. If a low budget, R-rated movie doesn't have any nudity in it, it almost certainly means the people making it are fooling themselves about their abilities and don't understand the story they're telling or the audience for which that story is intended. To put it mathematically, R rating + no name actresses who keep their clothes on = powerful suck. Killers II: The Beast is rated R and has no unclothed females in it. You figure it out.Back to the list…9. If you wake up and find yourself trapped in an insane asylum, you can stun the medical personnel into silence by executing a mighty pelvic thrust.10. If you're making a movie that's set in a hospital and you can't afford a lot of extras, avoid camera shots straight down long, barren hallways that make your set look like The Emptiest Hospital On Earth.11. Female patients in psychiatric wards are routinely dressed in cut off tank tops that display their bare midriffs.12. When doing a scene where two characters are shooting at each other, you really need to avoid having it remind people of that scene from The Naked Gun where the people shooting at each other are only three feet apart.13. Killers 2: The Beast has so many flashback montages using footage from Killers that this may be the first true sequel that actually qualifies as a remake. And no, Evil Dead II doesn't count. That's clearly a remake that's merely labeled a sequel.In case you're wondering, this movie is about Heather (Kim Little). She's apparently the only survivor of some sort of drug gang massacre from the first film. She wakes up in the nut house with some frat boy orderlies trying to kill her. Unfortunately for them, when Heather gets angry she transforms into this mix of Wolverine and Deathstroke (that's a DC comics super-villain, for those of your with lives). She butchers a few orderlies and then some nattily dressed gangsters show up to murder Heather. That doesn't work out well for them and Heather winds up driving off into the horizon, no doubt heading for another sequel that I hope to Zeus never got made.There are worse movies than this, but that's about as far as I can go.

Basically, we have a movie that didn't live up to its potential.This film's crew clearly included a talented DP and makeup artist, yet the same cannot be said for the director or editor (who are incontrovertibly more important towards a film's success).There were a few nuggets of good writing and good visuals scattered throughout the movie, but the bulk was simply lacking. There are a lot of failed attempted at humor, failed attempts at action, and failed attempts at characterization. Occasionally we're intrigued, occasionally we're excited, and occasionally we're even somewhat impressed, but usually we're bored or rolling our eyes. The end result is a thoroughly mediocre experience.