Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives!

This is a ludicrous and unnecessary sequel. When there are only two characters from the original movie who agree to be in the sequel, you know you're in trouble. This movie takes a questionable premise at best and makes it even more so; for instance, the gung-ho guitarist of Eddie's new band -- a band of scrappy, mostly '80s glam metal rockers who are rough around the edges and seem to be there to ensure that all the bad haircuts of the era are present and accounted for -- books a tour without telling anyone else in the band. The band -- including construction worker Eddie and his new girlfriend -- somehow manage to go and immediately play packed houses on every stop. Furthermore, whereas Eddie in the original movie came off as a kind of tortured artist with Olympian ambitions of making timeless music, the Eddie in this movie comes off as a bully and a tyrant in his dealings and behavior with his new band -- a band that doesn't have a name, by the way, even as they're booking shows left and right.

The music itself is so embarrassingly dated that one can't help but wish that Eddie had not "risen from the dead." The music pads the movie with montage after montage after montage. Suspension of disbelief is put into serious question in nearly every scene. For example, the scene where Eddie reunites with Sal, the former bassist of the Cruisers, by approaching him out of the blue on the beach 25 years after faking his own death, is an incredible monument to preposterous dialogue and bad acting and characterizes the ineptitude that defines this movie as a whole.