Hyper Inactive

About a year ago, I wrote about a low-budget Canadian sci-fi film called Cube, in which a group of strangers are thrown inside a surreal maze-like prison and tested with devious traps and psychological horrors. It was enough of a cult hit to spawn both a sequel and prequel film. I recently watched the former, called Cube 2: Hypercube. And though I was pleasantly surprised by the original, Cube 2 was a truly miserable follow-up.

Cube 2 is almost a re-make of the original more than a sequel. It once again features a number of strangers awakening inside a maze-like structure. The archetypes of the characters are an almost-perfect match to the original. There's a compassionate lead female (again played by a B-list sci-fi actress; I'll touch on that briefly later). There's an aggressive alpha male who slowly gives in to madness. The autistic savant of the first film is replaced here by an old woman deep in the throes of Alzheimer's, but you can basically keep mapping one character to another all the way down the line.

The budget of the sequel is a little bigger. Though the movie is still largely confined to its Cube prison, a bit more money was spent on the set, and a fair amount more spent on supplementary visual effects. The concept of the prison is amplified too, literally taken to the next power, as a "tesseract" instead of a cube -- a four-dimensional construct capable of warping time and blending alternate realities.

But these interesting sounding tradeoffs come at some serious expense. The writing -- not of a truly high quality in the original -- is pitiful here. Hackneyed dialogue grates as it spews from the mouths of some truly bad actors. The lead, Kari Matchett (who you might recognize from various TV appearances, including a main role on the short-lived Invasion) is the only one reasonably credible; the rest aren't even worthy of amateur community theater.

The first Cube was somewhat entertaining in spite of its limitations. The sequel just demonstrates what would have happened if the first film hadn't gotten lucky in a few areas. I give Cube 2 a D+. Even if you liked the original, you'd best avoid it.