A Major Disappointment

The acting in this movie is really good.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

(There are Spoilers) The continuing adventures of psycho doctor Charles Raynor, Harry Hamlin, are shown her with the somewhat, who in spite his 180 IQ, crazy doc is first seen being released from prison wearing an obnoxious and silly looking clip-on beard that he seems to have trouble keeping on.It doesn't take long for the Doc to get together with his long suffering second wife Sally, Joanna Kerns, who despite his attempting to murder his first wife Kathrine is still madly in love with him. It's later that Raynon starts to plan his next move in both tracking down and murdering his ex-wife, who's in witness protection, and her lawyer Bill Garner, Bill Dow, who had him convicted in his first wife's attempted murder.The movie has Raynon get a job as an assistant lab technician at a local clinic while at the same time try to get his medical license back. What Raynon is really up to is trying to establish for himself a new identity and then use it to get to both Kathrine and Garner in a half-baked and cockamamie murder plan that he cooked up while behind bars.For those of us who didn't see the first "Deadly Intentions" made for TV movie were given a few clips of it with Raynor and Sally watching it on TV in one of the the films lighter moments. there's also the mystery of Raynon's teenage daughter Stacy, Fairuza Balk. Were given the impression that Stacy and daddy Charlie, Raynon, are deep into hard drugs that he's supplying her, as well as himself, from the medical lab that he works at. But halfway through the movie Stacy is somehow cut from the film as she takes off with her also drug dealing boyfriend and never seen again! ***SPOILERS*** This whole idiotic plan quickly starts to fall apart when the by now certifiably insane nut-case Raynon puts it into motion at the very end of the movie. It's hard to believe that Raynon got as far as he did since with his criminal record and very strange, to say the least, behavior it should have been easy for the both police and hospital authorities to see right through his sham as soon as it began. In the end Raynor ended up where he so justly belong behind bars screaming his lungs out and blaming the world, especially his wife Sally, for putting him in the fix that he found himself in; A padded cell in the criminally insane section of the Allegheny Correctional Facility.

I was very interested to see this because I had seen "Deadly Intentions" and I wanted to see how the story ended...what happened when the new wife inevitably found out that her new hubby really was a maniac.Except for the fact that I did find out I was very disappointed in this one. Maybe if I hadn't seen the first one, I wouldn't have been. The character of Sally only appeared briefly in "Deadly Intentions", during Charles Raynor's trial, but she was quiet and seemed very classy. She was portrayed in the second movie as a Southern stereotype...bad accent, and kind of tacky. This is no reflection on Joanna Kerns, who is a good actress. It was more the way the character was written this time around.Harry Hamlin is a fine actor but he just couldn't pull off Charles Raynor like Michael Biehn. It's difficult to explain the difference...Hamlin came off as evil, which Raynor was, of course. But he couldn't quite give me that feeling that he was totally "unhinged" like Biehn did. Hamliln's Raynor made me think "Yuck"...Biehn's literally made my skin crawl!

This film lacks the intensity of the first film, and Harry Hamlin is certainly no match for Michael Biehn. However, by this time, Biehn had found bigger fame after The Abyss, Aliens, Navy Seals and was at this time working on K2. 1991 seemed to be a year where Michael Biehn and sequels didn't work. His scene in Terminator 2 was deleted. He turned down Alien 3 and, as we see, he didn't appear in this film. As yet, Biehn has yet to star in a sequel. This film just didn't work, with the absence of Biehn and decent plot, it didn't reach its audience and didn't make the impact of the first film!