Abducted 2: The Reunion
(1994)
Director: Boon
Collins
Cast: Dan Haggerty, Jan Michael Vincent, Raquel Bianca
This Canadian made direct to video movie made the news
in Canada several
years after it was made, when American radio shock jock Howard Stern
brought
up the movie on his radio show. He said he liked it, admitting it
wasn't
great art or anything, but it did the job, and he gave it his ringing
endorsement
(which thrilled the producers, according to the news article I read.)
While
I don't think Abducted 2: The Reunion is deserving of a
hearty
rave like Stern's, I think there's enough sleaze and entertainment
value
to give it a recommendation. It may not be a movie to put first on your
list, but it will more than do when you've seen all of your first
choices
I haven't seen the original Abducted,
though from what
I've heard, it seems to have been inspired by the true life story from
several years back of Olympic biathlon athlete Kari Swenson, who was
kidnapped
in a forest by mountain men who wanted a wife. The limited information
in this sequel suggests that in the previous movie, crazed mountain man
Vern (Lawrence King) kidnapped a woman runner in the forest, and in the
end was killed by Joe (Haggerty), who happened to be his father. In
this
sequel, several years have gone by, and Joe has returned to the same
area,
as a guide for big game hunter Brad (Vincent), though I would have
thought
they would be going to a retreat for alcoholics, being deep in the
wilderness.
Brad's character is established early in the movie when he almost runs
three women off the road when passing their car. "I just like to go
fast,"
he explains to the women when they catch up to him later, eerily almost
making a prophecy about the car accident Vincent would have several
years
later, when he tried to run his girlfriend off the road in real life
during
a drunken rage.
The three women are actually the main characters in the
movie; since
Haggerty and Vincent only appear sporadically throughout the movie, and
don't really do a thing for the plot, I think we can safely assume they
were just hired for their "star power". The story concerns those three
women, who were friends during their schooling in Europe, and have come
to the woods for a reunion. ("Why couldn't we have gone somewhere
civilized
like Geneva?" complains Maria in her impossibly thick accent. The
acting
by all three women, by the way, is pretty horrible, though fortunately
it's mostly amusing.) They hike up to Harmony Lake National Park and
camp
down for the night. However, they don't know what we've already guessed
- Vern is alive, and he's still one horny bastard. He comes upon the
women's
camp, and then grabs and ties up one women at a time, pausing only to
kill
the male hiker in the same general area, whose purpose of being in the
movie seems only to have been so the movie could deliver a gratuitous
murder
for the audience.
Shortly after the women have been tied up, Lawrence King
goes berserk with his character. For the next few minutes in front of
the women, Vern
shrieks "Haaaa!" noises, sticks out his tongue, does a ludicrous dance
around a fire, humps the ground, and goes through the women's packs.
"Ohhhhh,
ya got nice things!!!!! I LIKE!!!!" The character of Vern is the best
thing
about the movie, and whenever he's allowed to do something, the results
are always quite entertaining. Dressed in furs and deer antlers,
screaming
and rolling his eyes, King doesn't take his character or the movie the
least bit seriously, which is a wise thing in this movie. Abducted
2 is filled with a number of things that are either silly or
gratuitous
- sometimes both. It turns out one of the women knows martial arts, so
the next day, when Vern is taking the women through the woods (and gets
one of the women to do a striptease during a break), the women then
suddenly
attacks him with a succession of karate kicks, then she escapes into
the
woods by doing multiple cartwheels. It's even sillier than it reads
here.
What's even sillier is what the movie does to show the characters in
states
of undress. A sex scene with nudity is accomplished by Vern forcing one
of the women to tell about the first time she had sex, which brings in
a flashback of her having sex with her boyfriend by a fire. This does
nothing
for the plot, by the way. Another scene has a woman hearing the sound
of
a helicopter, and yelling, "It's a plane"(!)*,
and she runs into a clearing, taking off her shirt so she can wave to
it.
Even when the women are clothed, the director likes to place the women
close together and get giggly, so they can provide some jiggle.
The screenwriting of Abducted 2 is
wonderfully cheesy;
one of the women actually asks the drooling Vern, "What's your sign?",
and Vern at one point says, "I know every valley and every drop of bird
s**t in it!" When the women decide to fight back, one growls, "I know
what
I have to do now - I have to think like him!" Someone even says
at one point, "You die!" There's a character named "Jack Webster",
which
will bring chuckles to Canadians (sorry, Americans, and people of other
nationalities.) There are some laughs also in the technical work; there
is stock footage of animals and mountains that was obviously shot by
someone
else, from looking at the grain in the film and the different weather
in
these shots. It was also funny in one scene when the camera is supposed
to be a P.O.V. shot from Vern's eyes (with the clichéd creepy "HA-ha-ha-ha-ha"
sound on the soundtrack); the view is from an angle which would suggest
Vern is crouched down, yet he's somehow able to move as fast as if he
was
standing up. Overall, though, the movie (which cost one million dollars
- Canadian) isn't that badly shot; though it resembles Canadian TV
dramas
at times, it's nowhere as bad as in Act Of
War. It's
pretty easy to hide a low budget in a movie that take place in the
wilderness,
and director Collins generally does a good job, though occasionally
there's
an embarrassing sign of the low budget, such as an offscreen explosion,
and a recently decapitated goat's head that seems to have been ripped
off
a plaque from someone's trophy room.
After a first half that pretty much zips along, the
movie bogs down considerably. Haggerty and Vincent's characters start
popping up in the
useless subplot; nothing they say or do in their scenes is really that
interesting - it seems they are not only there for their "star power",
but to pad out the running time to 91 minutes. Seeing them bumble
around
and not doing much, I was strongly reminded of that boring subplot
about
those two feeble-minded cops in Last House On The Left.
Without
their scenes, the movie would be considerably shorter. A large chunk of
the film is wasted with Vern holding one of the women captive in is
hidden
cave. It's a pretty boring sequence (maybe that's why the
aforementioned
sex scene was placed here.) I can understand why the climax of the
movie
leaves room for another sequel, but I would have preferred it if they
had
at least done it with more energy. Overall, though, I think there's
enough
energy elsewhere, and enough nonsense to make this worth a look when
you
can't find your top choices. I would think the same even if the movie
wasn't
filmed that far away from my city.
* Yes, yes, I know
that technically,
helicopters are considered airplanes (the rotors are the wings)....but
do you immediately think "an airplane" when you hear a helicopter?
Check
for availability on Amazon (DVD)
See also: Rituals, Survival Quest, Skinheads
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