The Darkman sequel so good it went straight to video. Liam Neeson is gone, Sam Raimi is gone and most of the budget is gone. They got Larry Drake to come back, though. We thought he died in the first movie, but nope. A lot of people survive being inside exploding helicopters, it turns out. Drake’s Durant wakes up from a long coma and immediately gets back to the business of being one of the better campy one-liner spewing villains of the time. His new thing is weapons dealing. His idea is to spring a certain criminal tech genius from prison and get him to a build a bunch of Star Wars laser guns. Before that plan can get into full-swing though, he needs factory space and what location does he pick? One that just happens to be presently occupied by a scientist who’s working on advancements in skin grafts. And who’s helping out Mr. Wizard? DARKMAN, of course, still trying to fix up his burned lasagna face with something that doesn’t melt off after ninety-nine minutes. When the scientist won’t budge on the property, Larry Drake changes his negotiation tactics to the old kick-you-in-the-head method and the push-the-other-guy’s-face-onto-red-hot-heating-coils technique. Now, it’s up to Darkman to save the day, but with less spectacular action scenes this time and lots more chit-chat with a TV investigative reporter who’s on the case.
Arnold Vosloo plays not-Liam Neeson in this one. He’s a more mild-mannered Darkman for the mid-90s. The original movie was five years ago, though. Maybe sometime in the middle of that, he figured out a way to prevent his own skin grafting methods from getting into his brain and turning him increasingly psycho like in the first one. Works for me.
This was supposed to be the THIRD Darkman movie. It was shot simultaneously with Darkman III: Die Darkman Die, which was the intended Part 2. For some reason, the Hollywood experts decided to flip ’em.