James Marsters

STUDIO: Paramount Pictures, Viacom Production

RELEASE DATE: Available Now

TIME: 84 mins.

DVD EXTRAS:Additional Scenes, V-DAY Spotlight

RATING: R ZAP2IT RATING: "Strange Frequency 2," recently released on DVD, features four short stories covering such music industry woes as drug addiction, crazed fans, a deadly one-hit wonder and the devil. Yes, that’s right the devil-taking form as a menacing A&R rep, naturally.

An interesting concept with paranormal storylines, but the final product was painful to watch. Sometimes when a movie leaves you with such uncomfortable feelings, you try to pinpoint what went wrong. Was it the script? The acting? The directing? In this case it was everything.

The performances were weak and the dialogue forced, but you could easily blame that on the script. It wasn’t that the script was entirely unfortunate — there were a few genuinely funny moments, but they probably weren’t meant to be funny.

The serious problem was the lacked of depth and suspension of disbelief. The shorts all relied on the elements of the supernatural to wield a juicy story, which initially, seemed like an OK approach, but there wasn-t enough believability support from the script, actors or the flow of the film.

The film stars some pretty popular actors with credible gigs under their belts — James Marsters, Wendi Malick and Peter Strauss all donated their talents to a film that could have been sick, twisted and severe, but ended up easy, straight and light.

It was hard to get to know the characters when the story sped by so quickly and without history or any real expectations. You couldn’t feel sorry for Mitch in "Soul Man" when the devil stole his soul because you only got to know Mitch for five minutes. See the problem?

Ultimately, "Strange Frequency 2" was disappointing and uneventful, but it still gets a star for effort.