In Montreal, the unruly computer expert Jack Addison (Patrick Muldoon) receives an envelope with the information that his stepbrother Zane Ziminski had died of a heart attack in Alaska. Jack goes to bar after-hours where he meets Sandra Wolf (Catherine Blythe) and they have one night stand. When he opens the envelope, he finds photos and information about an alien invasion and a letter scheduling an encounter at a refrigerating chamber in an isolated place. Jack believes Zack is delusional but he goes to the spot where he meets the investigative reporter Bridget Riordan (Jane Sibbett) and the scientists Prof. Nelson Zarcoff (Michael Sarrazin),Trevor Aguilar (Emidio Michetti) and Tom Billings (Stéphane Blanchette). Jack finds an alien device in a hidden bag and Trevor feels the cold and reveals as an alien. He activates a sphere that sucks everything around and Tom and he are sucked by the artifact. However Jack and Bridget escape together and Zarcoff also succeeds to escape, but is killed in his hotel room by an alien weapon. Meanwhile Jack goes home to see Sandra and finds that his apartment was also sucked. Further Sandra is an alien and together with her partner Wotan (Mike Scherer),they hunt Jack and Bridget down. Will they succeed to warn the earthlings and stop the alien invasion?

"The Second Arrival", a.k.a. "Arrival II", is a lame sequel of "The Arrival". The characters are not well developed and the skill of Jack Addison to interact and program the alien computer so fast is weird. The DVD does not have subtitles and is difficult to understand the voice of Jane Sibbett, at least for foreigners. In the end, "The Second Arrival" is a forgettable sci-fi. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "A Invasão 2" ("The Invasion 2")

This unwanted film is a sequel to THE ARRIVAL, a neat little science fiction thriller about an alien conspiracy starring Charlie Sheen. While slightly lacking in the special effects department, the film had many good ideas, such as aliens using global warming as a way to take over the earth. That film went straight to video. However, the sequel goes even lower, and has actually gone straight to cable. And if that wasn't enough, THE SECOND ARRIVAL turns out to be one of the worst, lamest films I've ever seen. Talk about the law of diminishing returns, that rule is put into overdrive in this film. The only good aspects are mere rehashes of scenes in the original thriller, and the rest of the film is full of such mind-numbing banality that you'll wake up sweating in the night, after having nightmares about being made to watch this torture endlessly.

Forget the plot - it's non-existent. After a few brief set-up moments, the film consists of the 'heroic' pair basically running around, driving, getting attacked in some way by the aliens, thinking up a new plan, getting stopped in their tracks, thinking up a new plan, and then it all unravels and the director has no idea how to finish it, so he just has a big implosion at the end for special effects sake. However, even if the plot was stupendous, it would still be a chore to watch the painfully bad acting of Patrick Muldoon as he labours his way through each scene, staring blank-faced at the camera and making tired jokes which nobody thinks are funny. This guy must have been living on a different planet at the time of filming, he's obviously not inhabiting his own body, as he's stiffer than a plank coated in concrete. Mind you, Jane Sibbett isn't much help either, coming across as a sub-rate Scully, her acting skills consisting of shouting and tossing her hair. The only guy of note is Michael Sarrazin, the single 'name' actor in the entire film, and he gets murdered near the beginning as well.

So what is there to watch for? The special effects? They're mostly bad, but bad in a look-at-the-bad-special-effect kind of way. The spinning alien globe is done to death, too, and to add insult to injury, there's only one alien in the entire film! (unless we include some CGI shots lasting for less than a second). The film reaches new lows when it introduces a virtual reality landscape, looking like a late '80s computer program. No, an early '80s computer program. It's that awful. The one good scene in the entire film occurs in the cold storage room, but it lasts quarter of an hour at most and it just goes downhill from there. Added to the blend is a totally gratuitous nude scene with an actress who really shouldn't be appearing naked. If you want backwards-legged aliens then watch the first film, nothing is done here that wasn't done there. In fact, forget that this film exists, because it adds nothing to the mythology apart from some nifty alien devices, and it's an embarrassment all round. Avoid!

After seeing the Arrival I was looking forward to this one. I notice that the studio claims proudly that they only spent a quarter of the budget on this film that they did on the first one. And it shows it. The casting was bad, the acting is laughable and the script was downright idiotic.

The premise here is that sometime after the end of the first film, Charlie Sheen's character is killed off. He leaves clues for his brother to find out what is going on. It is all down hill from there. The sfx were OK but that is about all. they really wasted five reels of Kodak film stock on this one. I'd safely say give it a miss, unless you are a glutton for punishment.