First things first, if you loved or hated the first Art Of The Devil film, don't automatically assume that you'll love or hate this sequel as it really has nothing to do with the original film, making it a sequel in name only. While it deals with a few similar themes, there's no need to see the original before seeing this film, they're not really related at all (in fact this one sort of plays like a more interesting, nastier version of I Know What You Did Last Summer with doses of Audition thrown in for good measure).

The story follows a group of six high school students who despise their gym teacher. Why? Because he's a jerk, basically. He's a tempermental man who isn't afraid to get rough with the students when it suits him, and he's a bit of pervert, she's using one of the kids' mothers for sex, and he's just a nasty person with seemingly no redeeming qualities whatsoever. To take care of the teacher once and for all, our heroes decide to seek out a voodoo priest/witch doctor type from Cambodia to work some sinister mojo for them which results in the gym teacher's horrifying death in which fishhooks pop out of his skin (a great way to open a film, really). Before this expert in black magic makes this happen, however, the kids are warned that they will be responsible for whatever karmic retribution should be laid upon them for this act, and that it just might come back to haunt them somewhere down the line. Of course, being impulsive young people, they pay no attention to his warnings, they just want their enemy dead.

With that nastiness out of the way, life moves on for the group and all but one of them leaves the small town that they grew up in once high school is finished. The one who stuck around, Ta, didn't do so by choice, he got locked up in prison for a crime he wasn't really responsible for – the drowning of his only brother. As the years pass, he's released back into the general population and shortly after that, he finds his father dead. His old friends all return home to attend the funeral, and once they do, strange and sinister things soon start happening, things that remind them what they did all those years ago…

Oddly enough, Art Of The Devil 2 was directed not by a solitary director, as is usually the case with a feature film, but by a group of seven Thai directors known as the Ronin Team. This is an interesting approach to filmmaking and it lends itself to some very creative and unique moments, but at the same time, it's also obvious that there was more than one person guiding this movie as there are definitely some disjointed spots. The plot jumps around quite a bit, back and forth in time and from character to character, which makes for some confusion here and there as well as some flat out bad ideas in terms of how the story is told – this does affect the movie in a negative way. That being said, the kill scenes and the lead ups to some of those kills scenes are fantastic and where the multiple directors hurt the film from a narrative stand point, it obviously helped with the murder set pieces. There are some wonderfully twisted moments in here, far stronger than the admittedly gruesome moments that made the first film as popular as it was.

Though there's definitely more to the film than just the gore scenes, the gore scenes are what it handles the best. The acting is good (in fact the female lead, Napakpapah Nakprasit, won the Thai equivalent of an Oscar for her performance in the film, which is surprising considering how grisly it is), the cast of performers assembled for the feature do just fine with the material (though watching the English dubbed version of the film detracts from the performances considerably as the dubbing doesn't really suit the performers of the movie particularly well) even if they're not re-inventing the wheel with how they handle some of the more unusual situations that they encounter. The movie also has some great atmosphere, helped in no small part by some interesting and unique Thailand locations and sets that give the movie it's distinct feel.

Ultimately, however, the story just tries to cram too many characters involved in too many situations into its running time which results in a film that suffers from bland character development and a few loose ends that could have been tied up in a more satisfactory manner. Thankfully, the sheer ballsiness of the gore in the film overshadows pretty much everything else, making this a rather visceral and intense horror film even if it isn't one that will leave you thinking once the shock wears off. That ultimately means that Art Of The Devil 2 is worth seeing for the creative kills and the splendidly bloody effects work, not for the story – but hey, it works.