There are several important things you have to know before even trying to watch The Gates of Hell Part II: Dead Awakening.  First off, it’s probably the most poorly-lit movie I’ve seen since Monster a Go-Go; Lite-Brites that give off more of a glow.  I suggest turning the brightness on the screen wayyyy up, or else the regular blackouts of the film will be completely indistinguishable from scenes where something happens.

    The sound in Gates of Hell II is really bad, too.  It all sounds muffled, like they dubbed all the dialogue while underwater.  So it’s really hard to tell what’s going on when something happens.

    However, you’ll be pleased to know that virtually nothing happens in the film anyway.  It has nothing to do with Lucio Fulci’s The Gates of Hell (aka City of the Living Dead), though the film is “Dedicated to the Memory of” the overrated Italian gore master.

    Now, I’ve never seen a single review of this thing, and despite several searches, I can’t find anything more than a brief mention of it’s being for sale at Amazon.  The Internet Movie Database doesn’t even list it.  This seems really odd, and if I was a conspiracy theorist, I’d suspect some sort of cover-up.  After all, this is a desperate attempt to cash-in on one of horror’s most revered names.  You’d think someone, somewhere out there, would want to warn people.  Surely someone get suckered into buying this thing and is pissed off enough about the quality that they’d at least set up a brief review of it.

    But no.  Nothing.  So I was determined to be the first.

    Then I realized the problem, and this is probably why this film seems to have completely vanished off the face of the Earth.  This thing is so awful, so impenetrably dull, so inconceivably snore-inducing that it is impossible to get all the way through.

    You just can’t do it.  I’ve tried nearly a dozen times.  I’d start watching it and fall asleep less than ten minutes in.  No matter how much caffeine I’d pump into my system, no matter how many sugar packets I slammed, no matter how much speed I snorted, focusing my entire attention on Gates of Hell II: Dead Awakening led to a quick comatose state by the time something vague happened to some vague people in darkness.

    So here’s the best I can do with a plot synopsis.  There’s this lady, played by Tamara Hext, who was Miss Texas of 1985.  Her sister vanishes and she hires a cop to find her.  Meanwhile, some members of a weird occult group talk vaguely about calling something off.  Some woman named Marilyn dies, and a cat shows up in a freezer.  Silly special effects that seem to involve putting razor blade to film pop up.  Things get hazy and I can’t figure out what’s going on, and the sound is too bad and the picture is too dark for me to care.  My pillow is soft and cozy.  I dream of fishes, coming at me from all corners.  I wake and there are credits.

    To be sure, there are some events in Gates of Hell II, and there seems to be a demon of some sort, but nothing I’d call a zombie.  There’s some yelling, a little shooting and some dramatic music, but I couldn’t tell you what they were all about.  I may have been asleep, or maybe I just couldn’t tell what was going on.
 
    The one advantage to Gates of Hell II is that, with all the darkness and narcoleptic urges it instills in its’ audience, the actors have nothing to worry about.  It’s unlikely that anyone will ever recognize them from this.

    I’ve seen a lot of cheaply-made films, and many low-budget amateur productions are filled with mad acting, silly dialogue and phony gore.  But none of these, nor any movie I’ve ever seen, has so instilled me with the urge to fall into a deep, dark coma more than The Gates of Hell II: Dead Awakening.  Warhol films have more energy.  The Passenger has a more thrilling pace.

    But GoH2 isn’t bad for any of the obvious reasons.  The acting is bad but not horrible, and it might have an intriguing premise.  It just looks and sounds so horrible that anyone who makes it past the sub-Video Toaster credits will become completely disinterested with trying to follow it just moments later.  This is made more inexcusable by the fact that it's marketed as a sequel to a movie it has nothing to do with.  At all.

    For those keeping track, here it is.  The Gates of Hell II: Dead Awakening is the worst film I’ve ever seen.  Beware.