Film

Highlander II: The Quickening

Name: Highlander II: The Quickening
Genre: Fantasy, Action, Adventure, Science Fiction
Released: 1991
Cast: Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, Virginia Madsen, Michael Ironside, John C. McGinley

A bewildering sequel that rewrites its own mythology on the fly, turning the immortal Highlander into a mortal alien refugee. It's tonally chaotic, visually overstuffed, and narratively incoherent—but its sheer commitment to its own absurdity makes it weirdly compelling. For people who love watching expensive films fail spectacularly.

TMDb rating

2.3

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Conan the Barbarian1982

John Milius's original sword-and-sorcery masterpiece has the mythic weight, practical action, and scenery-chewing gravitas that Highlander II desperately wanted. Schwarzenegger carries genuine melancholy beneath the muscle.

But It's long, bleak, and philosophically heavy—less a rollicking adventure than a meditation on mortality and meaninglessness in a violent world.

The Hidden1987

A wild-card action film starring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI agent paired with an alien-hunting cop. It has the same wild genre mixing, practical effects chaos, and gleeful plot escalation that makes Quickening so fascinatingly broken.

But The premise is silly and the tone veers wildly between cop thriller and body-horror comedy. It's deliberately trashy in a way that requires patience.

Highlander: Endgame2000

The fourth film in the series actually attempts to rehabilitate the mythology by bringing back Sean Connery and treating the lore with something like reverence. Action is solid, stakes feel real, and it respects what came before.

But By 2000, action filmmaking had moved on, and it shows. Also requires familiarity with the TV series to land emotionally.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Highlander II: The Quickening

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Masters of the Universe1987

Both are about warriors from alien worlds confronting Earth modernity; both squander their premise on confused mythology retconning.

Gary Goddard's He-Man film shares Quickening's central DNA: a fantasy mythology lifted into a sci-fi frame, fish-out-of-water fish-out-of-water storytelling, and the exact budget and effects aesthetic of early-90s genre confusion. It's a spiritual ancestor.

But It's cheap-looking despite the budget, the pacing is leaden, and Dolph Lundgren sleepwalks through the lead. It's a chore to sit through.

Tomorrowland2015

Brad Bird's sprawling sci-fi adventure has that same DNA: a confused mythology that keeps expanding, practical effects mixed with digital madness, and genuine visual imagination drowning in its own concept creep.

But It's overstuffed and its third act collapses under the weight of its own exposition. Many found it incomprehensible on first viewing.

Flash Gordon1980

Mike Hodges's gleefully artificial space opera embraces camp with total sincerity. It's precisely the kind of stylized, effects-heavy weirdness that Quickening was aiming for, but actually lands because it knows exactly what it is.

But The entire film is aggressively artificial—sets, costumes, acting style, Queen soundtrack. If you want naturalism, look elsewhere.

RoboCop 21990

Verhoeven's sequel pushes everything to grotesque extremes: more violence, more satire, more narrative incoherence. It's a masterpiece of artistic chaos and proves sequels can improve on originals by leaning into their own surreality.

But It's deliberately repulsive—child violence, graphic gore, grotesque body horror. The satire can feel thin.

Lifeforce1985

A Tobe Hooper space vampire film with a naked alien seductress, London under martial law, and practical creature effects. The ambition-to-coherence ratio is as tilted as Quickening's, but it's audaciously weird.

But It's incomprehensible in places, tonally uneven, and relies on some uncomfortable sexual imagery. The plot doesn't hold up.

Judge Dredd1995

Stallone in an absurdly expensive adaptation of a comic character that has no idea what it's doing. It fails spectacularly at nearly everything but refuses to apologize—pure product of the mid-90s action excess that birthed Quickening.

But It's poorly written, the pacing drags, and Stallone's deadpan delivery doesn't help. It's painful in ways that aren't fun.

Battlefield Earth2000

Roger Christian's batshit Scientology epic about aliens enslaving Earth stars John Travolta in a nine-foot-tall alien and costs around $100 million on pure spectacle. It's instructive as a case study in what can go wrong when money meets no taste.

But It's genuinely, painfully bad. Not entertainingly bad—exhaustingly, moment-to-moment bad. The editing, script, and direction are all fundamentally broken.

Zardoz1974

Both are obsessed with immortality as curse, the dissolution of physical form, and whether power means anything. Zardoz does it as art; Quickening does it as accident.

John Boorman's fever dream about immortal men living in a domed paradise, a flying stone god, and apocalyptic destiny. It has Quickening's willingness to demolish its own logic in service of visual philosophy, but actually means it—and pulls it off.

But It's genuinely pretentious, intentionally oblique, and absolutely uninterested in plot coherence or entertainment. It demands active, unironic engagement.

Freaked1993

Both films from the same era embrace the possibility that a big budget can purchase weirdness—that confusion and rupture can be the point. Freaked knows it; Quickening suspects it.

Alex Winter's cult comedy about teenage tourists turned into monsters at a freak show is a monument to '90s anarchic filmmaking. It has Quickening's anti-glossy effects chaos and tonal pandemonium, but weaponizes them for pure absurdist comedy.

But It's a cartoon logic film with no plot to speak of. The humor is juvenile, the effects are intentionally grotty, and it asks nothing of itself except to be weird.