Remember Are You Scared?? (Screw you Word. There's supposed to be two question marks in that sentence!) Of course you don't. Most people probably didn't waste the time. Are you a fan of the Saw movies? If so, you may have rented the first Are You Scared? to keep your enjoyment of watching people tortured and mutilated for your viewing pleasure sated while waiting the 12 whole months between Saw sequels. If you didn't like any of Jigsaw's skewed morality murder exploits, then you probably avoided AYS? like the girls avoided my awkward social advances in high school. If you didn't like the mainstream Hollywood version, why cave-in and sit through a no-budget knock-off of the same damn premise. Right? Right. Me? I didn't hate Saw, but I didn't like it enough to watch the sequels. I somehow got roped into seeing the sub-par first sequel (which, when you consider the low par set by the first, you know it's bad) with it's "lesser Wahlberg" leading man and remember little more than something about a nonsensical plot twist about tattoos and somebody digging through a pit of hypodermic needles. I wouldn't even know that they were already up to Part VI if it weren't for the fact that it's advertised on the sides of the fucking 3D glasses that came with my DVD of the My Bloody Valentine remake...

The only reason I reviewed the previous AYS? was because it was a solicitation from a UK based DVD company called Revolver. They used to send me a new movie to review every couple of weeks, but between not having the time/interest to keep up with their new releases and feeling kinda bad because they thought they were sending screeners to a website that people actually read, I opted off their mailing list. I guarantee that the shipping costs to send us promotional DVDs across the Atlantic ended up costing Revolver more than whatever they might have made from the non-existant sales generated by my "less than favorable" reviews. If you missed Are You Scared? and don't feel like watching it before you read this review, this "sequel" has nothing to do with the original beyond the title. Nobody in the cast, neither of the co-writers/co-directors, not even a producer or caterer to connect the two. It was originally being made under the titles Tracked and Geohunt, but the sequel moniker was no doubt glued on to try and appeal to the "Hey, I never saw the original, but it must've been good if they made another one!" crowd that you see standing around Cockbuster on Friday nights, mouths agape with drool dripping onto their shoes while they try to figure out which of the Ernest movies they haven't seen yet. It's not that I think all sequels need to be associated with the movies that precede them. That would just make too much sense. Besides, it was a common practice back in the '70s and '80s, especially in other countries. I'm pretty sure that in Italy the House and Demons series now have something like 40 different installments. All I ask though is that whomever re-imagined whatever this was into an Are You Scared? sequel could've been a little more imaginative with the titling. Calling it Are You Scared 2 drops the question mark entirely, turning it into a wholly nonsensical statement. A much better suggestion? "Are You Scared Too?". This way the title not only makes grammatical sense, but it also excuses making a sequel that has nothing to do with the original by adding "too" as in "also" as opposed to "two" as in "a second chapter to the previous story". To most of you I probably sound like your bitchy old 9th grade English teacher with a comment like that, but I know there are some out there who agree with me. It's to them that I dedicate this review.

Team DNA are a quartet of your typical internet age ass clowns. No idea why they call themselves DNA though. One guy's name is Dallas and the other's name is Andrew, but the girls go by Reese and Taryn, so I don't know where the 'N' in 'DNA' is coming from. They're involved in some kind of national game of hide-and-seek along the information superhighway where they traverse the countryside in search of real life hidden packages in competition with other teams to see who can find what the fastest, all broadcast via the gang's poorly designed web page. I know The Tomb has never been at the forefront of point and click aesthetics, but their site's just a gray screen with a couple of video links and a weak message board. Sorry, any time I can try to make my crappy website sound better than someone else's crappy website (even a fake website in a no-budget stinker flick) makes me feel better about myself. The locations of the sought packages (which look like Craftsman tool kits with the labels removed) are broadcast to our four tools via viewer challenges submitted to their site. Having successfully acquired their latest hidden "treasure" in a backwoods junkyard, their final objective comes from an anonymous source who calls DNA's big finale "Ultimate Doom". The four laugh off the corny mission name and set out to make "internet history"... meaning .00003% of the people on the 'net will know their names and faces for about a week... or until the next YouTube video of cats doing wacky and/or adorable things comes out and they're immediately forgotten. Whichever comes first. In most cases, that would be me. *rimshot*.

Being the omnipresent observers of these shenanigans, naturally we know that "Ultimate Doom" isn't just an anthology of awesome first-person shooting greatness, but no doubt an omen for what the four are in for. Hopefully it will be a timely ultimate doom too, because the longer I have to look at the one idiot's "meta-tard faux-graffiti urban white guy skull tattoo" t-shirt, the more likely I am to go outside and start kicking pregnant women. The "director" of this big mission is a sinister figure (Tony Todd!) who owns a nature preserve (?!) and spends his screen time sitting behind a trio of computer screens, watching the hidden cameras he has all over his property and obsessing over DNA's pissy female lead/website mascot while watching other would-be treasure hunters falling for the same trap he intends to spring on the fuckhead four. He works his editing board, putting together his own snuff film mixtapes while an insane redneck Charlie Church guy and his horror masked accomplice put generic co-eds through the Eli Roth grinder. A lot of these so-called "treasure hunters" I noticed to be ditzy young bimbo types who probably spend their time drunkenly flashing their tits in the same bars together every Saturday while making Joe Francis more money. Good thing isn't in Smell-O-Vision, cuz I'd rather not ever know what Chlamydia smells like.

DNA have no trouble finding their final cache in a seemingly abandoned building on the wildlife reserve grounds. A building that's not only littered with big bulky security cameras that no one notices, but despite being filled with light, invokes the need for the kids to all get out their flashlights... I'm starting to a get a very familiar twitch behind my eye. Either I'm about to have an aneurysm or my IQ is burning out quicker than Jose Canseco's MMA career. Whatever the case, I'd rather have my foreskin filled with itching powder than continue watching this. But I will anyway, because useful things like furthering my education or helping out the needy require too much effort. The final prize of the hunt is a briefcase filled with money that's handcuffed to a severed arm. DNA is convinced that it's fake, just like every hapless victim in a slasher movie in convinced that the noise in the other room is just a cat and the stories about a masked killer prowling the abandoned discotheque are just urban legends. This is the part where they're locked in the room, put down with knock out gas, and carried away by guys in hazmat suits and gas masks. When they wake up, they're each given handheld GPS units and a 5 minute head start to find their asses out of the game reserve and to safety before the opposing "team", made up of the two aforementioned homicidal psychopaths, hunt them down and do things to them. Bad things. Painful things. Messy things. You know, the kind of things I wish I could do to them myself right now.

The remainder of the movie turns from plodding waste of time to mangled car wreck. Not the car wreck you're unable to look away from despite the horror it represents, but the car wreck that you never actually get to see because you're stuck in the mile long traffic jam the wreck created while the highway department works on clearing the debris. It's an inconvenient waste of time that not only resulted in the deaths of several people, but also ruined a good chunk of your day. As if the victims-to-be weren't devoid of any inkling of likability or personality, the guys killing them are even shallower and less interesting. Somebody else might say they're two dimensional characters, showing height and width but lacking any depth. I'd say that giving anybody on this cast credit for having two dimensions is too fucking generous. Unfortunately, I'm bound by the laws of physics or tectonics or geometry or whatever it is that applies here, so I'll just make some other nonsense mathematical remark and say that everyone in this movie in the square root of suck. Or they're suck to the crap power. Or they're all zeroes, so no matter how much you try to multiply them by whatever minuscule positive elements you can drudge up in defense, THEY WILL ALWAYS BE ZEROES. For fuck's sake, I'm putting more effort into thinking of ways to insult this shit than the people who made it put into creating it!

I don't think I've had this much trouble getting through a movie since Demonicus. I've had movies that bored me to sleep, but I always went back and finished them. I've had movies I've wanted to give up on and not bother writing a review for, but mustered up the will to see them to the end anyway. I have no life, but even I could think of twenty or thirty different things I could do from where I'm sitting right now that I'd rather do than sit here and continue typing this review. The movie is garbage, plain and simple. It's not even fun garbage like exploitation trash cinema, or garbage that can be elevated to greatness by a few rounds of substance abuse fueled riffing with friends. There's nothing redeeming about it. The E.T. game for the Atari 2600 was so unwanted that in 1983 Atari had millions of copies of the game buried in a New Mexico landfill. If Lionsgate, the suckers who thought distributing this digital diarrhea was a good idea, have any sense they'll do the same to their copies of Are You Scared 2. And do the same with the cardboard standees you call a cast too. Just to be safe. And make sure you seal them up in lead-lined drums too. We wouldn't want their toxic fallout contaminating the soil and wiping out any nearby biospheres.

Shit of this caliber has to almost be expected. The co-writers/co-directors/co-producers have no real prior creative credits to their names, so they're obviously of the "Hey, let's spend some of our own money to put a movie together, then use it as a way to get sluts onto our casting couch!" school of film. John Lands's only hope for fame is that one day some film school student behind that counter at McDonald's will mistake the name on his MasterCard for John Landis and offer him a free Big Mac for his work on Animal House. As for his partner, Russell Appling? He might as well just legally change his name to Road Apple, then lay down in a busy section of highway and hope that a passing semi puts him out of his misery. Then maybe we'll get lucky and Lands will bury himself alive in Road Apple's burial plot as a sign of "creative unity". And what about Tony Todd? The movie may not be worth a used pair of Depends, but surely a b-horror hero like himself has to bring something memorable to the otherwise forgettable 90 minutes, right? Sorry. Todd spends most of his screentime working his editing board, playing with his Etch-A-Sketch and talking to himself with this odd inflection that sounds like the man is farting in his own esophagus. What happened Tony? You're capable of so much more. Maybe not so much more, but you're at least capable of Candyman more, and that's leagues above what you've stooped to here, Sir. I know you need to pay your bills, but couldn't you have done something a little more honorable, like selling crack to school kids or poaching ivory? I know it's not much, but I've got a few bags of empty bottles and cans I'd gladly donate to you if it meant keeping your name from being stomped any more than it has already!