In the review for the first No Contest I was eager to find out what happened to the awkward romance between Tweed and Davi, so I felt compelled to track down this sequel to see the ongoing exploits of Tweed’s ass kicking heroine that they rushed out the next year. Paul Lynch is back in the helm and Tweed is the only returning star in this feature, however, the cast list is quite appealing with Lance Henrikson and Bruce Payne bulking it out.
Known as No Contact II: Access Denied here or Face The Evil in some other places this and whilst I initially thought that perhaps they wanted to distance themselves from the first as it seems to have had poor reviews across the board (and I thought it okay.) No Contest must have done enough business on video to warrant a sequel. However, Tweed uses the “No Contest” line towards the end just to confirm this is a sequel. If you come to this as Face The Evil without seeing the first, that line might be a little odd.
This time Tweed is visiting her sister in a museum/art gallery that comes under threat from Henrikson who has smuggled in some deadly Nazi gas through an exhibit and it’s up to Tweed to stop him. Tweed must take to the vents and crawl around eliminating baddies one by one.
Tweed’s character is, once again, side-lined a bit to allow for the larger than life villain to dominate the movie and here Henrikson is much more palatable as the antagonist. To my frustration there is no mention of Davi’s Crane from the first film. Henrikson is quite fun as a speech spouting villain and his impatience with a TV sitcom actor’s attempt to do Shakespeare is a fun highlight. Much like Davi in the original, Payne is a clipped hero who merely assists Tweed’s bind for survival. Davi might have been a good fit here and perhaps declined the offer to return and a quick rewrite saw the character changed to a director of the film she has been working on prior to the events in the gallery accompanying her to the gallery on a recce.
The film does become tiresome as it plods along. Where the first and Die Hard can cut away to a vastly different location, outside the main location, No Contest II can’t. Each main character is in different rooms in the art gallery and most locations look very similar. Writers Richard Beattie and Michael Stokes, who wrote Exit Speed (2008) are both genre vets but must have had trouble getting anything particularly lively going here.
The action feels a little less impactful with Tweed doing more of what she excelled at in the first film and I was happy to see her raising her dukes to fight off her foes again. Tweed is a good choice as an action star, when most female action stars likely come from a trained background Tweed does feel like an everyday woman thrown into a deadly situation. Sure, she is established as an action movie star at the start of the film and this would help balance her character to be able to pull off some of the more elaborate moves than her next door.
There is a stunt that they use twice, albeit with different characters at different points in the film, whereby Tweed shimmies down a rope in an abandoned atrium location that doesn’t quite fit with the gallery aesthetic. It does add a little more excitement but the second use, later in the film and with a less capable character, doesn’t really help with the tension. There is a little imagination in a couple of the action sequences utilising some of the installations of the art gallery as Tweed fights for her life in a dimly lit room full of cartoony images.
I go against the popular vote here. From what I can gather the majority of folk prefer this film over the first, but I would say the opposite. No Contest II ran out of steam quite quickly for me, despite Tweed being highly watchable. I will track down more of her non erotic work going forward as she makes for an engaging lead. Henrikson was fun for a while but I lost interest in his speeches fairly quickly and watched the clock awaiting his inevitable death. Payne was entirely forgettable.
Artwork is fine, if there is little variant to it. I don’t think No Contest II got a particularly large release and hasn’t seen too much in the way of releases since it’s VHS, DVD and cable debut.
It’s out there, there are copies of Ebay and Amazon but predominantly imports. The Amazon listing is, a time of writing, pretty expensive and I would guess that you might be lucky to get subtitles and scene selection as extras.
