The definition of derision is to meet with ridicule and / or mockery.  This is how I greeted the film ‘White Noise 2: The Light’.  The first film, the theatrically released ‘White Noise’ with Michael Keaton was as pointless and boring a movie as it comes, but again here we go with another Direct To Video sequel of some marginal Hollywood movie that nobody cared about when it was first released.  But wouldn’t you know it, similar in the way that ‘Undisputed 2’ was way more entertaining than its original Undisputed, and despite the fact that  ‘White Noise 2’ certainly had its share of problems, it was far more entertaining and than the original film as well.

Nathan Fillion is Abe Dale, a loving husband and a doting father enjoying a glorious anniversary morning with his wife of nine years and their young son.  Something seems to bothering the wife as she is rubbing her head, apparently coming down with some kind of unknown illness, but Abe decides that all she needs is some yummy in her tummy as the family runs off to breakfast.  At the restaurant, the wife and son start acting really, really strange.  Then top that off with a weird dude who has come into the restaurant who we would come to know as Henry Caine (Craig Fairbass) who seems to be looking for the young family.  At this point, the wife is in a full, convulsive, trip-out mode, as well as the boy, and Henry Caine walks by, pulls out a .45 and blows the wife and son away.  He then turns the gun on himself and puts a slug in his own grill.  Cue the grief music.

Months go by and Abe is confused as to why this lunatic killed his wife and son, but not him.  He confides in his good friend and business partner (in a business that we are never told what it is) Marty (Adrian Bloom) who tries to help him, but Abe can’t take it anymore and decides to end it all.  Twice Abe would die on the resuscitation table,

and twice they would bring him back preventing him from traveling towards the white light to be with his wife and son.  When Abe awakens in the ICU, he is greeted by pretty nurse Sherry (Katee Sachoff) and his specialist Dr. Karros (William McDonald) who Abe is seeing with a weird glow around him.  Dr. Karros is an EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) specialist you see and focuses his studies on people who see the white light when they leave the earth.    Abe has this power and then some as he sees various glowing people, hears all kinds of crazy sounds coming from speakers and TV sets, and, of course, he sees dead people.  Abe is starting to understand these things he’s going through and he’s thinking, with Dr. Karros help, he can make a breakthrough but he soon learns that Dr. Karros has died of a heart attack.  As it turns out, when Abe sees somebody glowing it means that they about to die.  This turns ol’ Abe into some kind of superhero as he soon starts saving folks lives, which makes him feel real good.  But as Abe will soon learn, when it’s your time to go, it’s probably in the best interest of society to let nature take its course because bad things apparently happen to folks who don’t die when they’re supposed to.  Just ask all those dead people that Abe is constantly seeing.

The thing that ‘White Noise 2’ is almost completely devoid of, upon watching this film, is originality as it lifts little bits from various shows such as ‘Dead Like Me’, ‘The Sixth Sense’, ‘The Dead Zone’,  and ‘Final Destination’ just to name a few and throws it in a big pot, cooks up and spits out a soup du jour.  That being said, the soup it spits out is quite tasty.  It’s kind of amusing actually in that ‘White Noise 2’ has far less in common with its own prequel than those other films I just mentioned.  Actually it has NOTHING in common with ‘White Noise’ other than the mention of EVP, and that’s not a bad thing.  This film is shot very well, has a very high creepiness factor to it and the story, though a mix of previous genres, as it is presented here is very interesting intense and gripping.  Things can get a little confusing at points, particularly when Abe is in the process of defining the meanings of the scripture, adding up these different numbers using numerology to come to some kind of bewildering conclusion.  The filmmakers don’t even bother to try to help us understand the meanings behind the films phenomena since I’m pretty sure they didn’t know what that crap meant either, but they had to try to explain off what was happening in someway, so there it is.  The ending was fairly lame as well, but rare is the film being made today that knows how to tie itself up properly, and ‘White Noise 2’ is no exception.

Nathan Fillion though does good work as the put upon Abe.  Here’s an actor that can’t seem to get a break.  He was in one the better TV series in ‘Firefly’ which was cancelled after 13 episodes, he was in a film I rated as one the 10 best of 2006 in ‘Slither’ which even the filmmakers mother didn’t go see, and now he’s in a DTV sequel of a film that nobody wanted to see in the first place.  Nonetheless, he gives a fine performance and carries the film very well.  Also, Battlestar Galactica’s Sackhoff gets a chance to play a normal soft feminine woman for a change and she is more than capable.  I assume the producers were going for the geek dollar with the pairing of ‘Firefly’ and ‘Battlestar’.  Though Sackhoff didn’t get a lot of screen, she made the most of her time on it.

In a sea of horrific DTV sequels, such as ‘Hollowman 2’, ‘The Butterfly Effect 2’ and ‘Doctor Doolittle 3’ just to name a few, ‘White Noise 2: The Light’ is that rarest of anomalies, a Direct to Video sequel of an already crappy original that manages to be not only better than the original, but not a bad film in its own right.