As bad as this is, it's still slightly better than the 1st one...

...just kidding. This is definitely worse than the 1st one. I never thought it'd be possible to out-do the "great" Uwe Boll, but somehow these guys did it.

First, a couple positives:

...Lance Henrikksen alone makes this watchable. Mr. Henrikksen is so awesome I'd watch a 90 minute movie of this guy reading the phone book. Why he can't get legit work and keeps getting these shytty B-movie roles is beyond me. I still think of him in the awesome and under-rated series Millennium.

Despite what others have said about this one vs the original, I feel the plot in this one is somewhat stronger. The 1st was 110% derivative, but at least this had an original thought or two.

Negatives:

Rachel Specter is one horrible actress. I mean...damn. I think she's even worse than Tara Reid if that's possible. Yes she's smokin hot, but given that her character is supposed to be central to the plot, they needed a stronger actress to pull this off.

Danny Trejo and Michael Pare get wasted with only a collective 10 minutes of screen time. What the hell is the point of even casting them just to kill them off so quickly?

Rick Yune is competent as Edward Carnby, but his personality here is 1-dimensional. In short, he's pretty boring and doesn't really show us why he is supposedly a brilliant master of the occult/supernatural. For the female audience, he does have ripped abs tho. [roll eyes] Also, although it's a small detail...the fact they cast an asian to play a caucasian role makes little sense. I've read the debate about this topic on here, but the bottom line is that continuity is somewhat important and this blows that out of the water. Obviously, Christian Slater's performance in the 1st one wasn't exactly earth-shattering, but compared to Yune's Carnby, Slater's version is Academy award winning work. Slater is simply far more "interesting" to view on screen and while Yune may be more convinicng as a martial artist (not used in the slightest in this film), Slater is way more convincing as "Indiana Jones Light" (which is basically what Carnby is supposed to be).

Plot-holes: why would "witch hunters" who are supposedly well-versed in how to, um, hunt and kill things that go bump in the night...bother using vanilla guns and continually shooting at a witch when she is able to assume a non-corporeal form that bullets just pass through? This makes ZERO sense.

Why would a witch who can assume non-corporeal form bother opening doors to walk through them instead of just phasing through the door/wall?

The last 20 minutes are just a mess.

Wow, this sucked.