2 Doc 2 Holliday.

First off I’d like to say congratulations to director/writer/grillmaster Brett Bentman. If you read my Doc Holliday review you’ll know I wrote that Brett has had one film in the prior four years with at least a 5.0 on IMDB. Well thanks to 2024 and 2025, Brett now has four films with the release of Doc Holliday 2, Jesse James, and Pinkerton. Doc Holliday 2 has a 6.0 review score while the original carries a 3.9, meaning that logistically speaking the sequel should be roughly 50% better than the original.

I found Doc Holliday 2 on this service Xumo, which misleadingly refers to Doc Holliday as a “Xumo Exclusive” even though the film has always been on Tubi and still is. Xumo appears to be the home of Bentman given a large portion of the “Xumo Originals” section are Bentman films, of which he released somewhere around 30 new flicks in 2024 and two hundred sixty seven in 2025 within the first four months. Bentman can knock out a film faster than the plate at my computer desk gets put in the sink.

There’s also a film here called 12 to Midnight, presumably a sequel to 10 to Midnight starring a disturbingly accurate lookalike of Charles Bronson. How have I never heard of Xumo? Well, the service isn’t listed anywhere on the internet on streaming trackers. Even the most obscure “where is this streaming” websites don’t have Xumo listed. As far as they’re concerned you actually can’t watch Doc Holliday 2 anywhere online, either streaming or buying it. Xumo is owned by Comcast which makes the obscurity even more confusing.

But the question is, does Doc Holliday 2 justify the better review score? Because Doc Holliday has 8 IMDB reviews, this one has 0 (11 ratings) and absolutely nobody has reviewed or rated the third film on IMDB, but there is one positive review on Letterboxd. I will say that knowledge has given me more respect for Bentman as a person, because he’s one of the few content mill directors whose studio isn’t putting up fake 10 star IMDB reviews.

Doc Holliday 2 once again stars Tom Zembrod as the titular Doc Holliday. In the time since the first movie, the good doctor finds himself on trial for the murder of Edward Bailey (Christopher Corson). Holliday has had some character development since the first movie, by which I mean he developed tuberculosis. The film is a flashback where Holliday recounts the death of Edward Bailey while maintaining his innocence in Bailey’s death. All this while being grilled by attorney Leonard Runyon, played by Walker Haynes and his gorgeous eyes.

I will say that Zembrod’s performance has grown on me, not that I hated it the first time around. If they ever need a new Jack Sparrow, I’ll be first in line to recommend Zembrod for the role. He has the kind of expressive eyebrows that haven’t been seen in cinema since Eric Freeman played Ricky in Silent Night Deadly Night 2 and I say without any sarcasm that this man should be in blockbuster westerns. Zembrod absolutely steals the show with his performance as Doc Holliday in all versions of him that appear. Walker Haynes is nothing if not a talented and handsome man with the kind of eyes you could stare into for hours on end, like if you melted Kyle MacLachlan with Sam Lake and said “make him more gorgeous”.

Everyone in this film looks right at place in a western movie and I’m pretty sure Tiffany McDonald could actually kill a person with that piercing glare of hers.

Doc Holliday 2 had me at the “faro enough” joke in the first few minutes and pretty much didn’t let go. Forget the generic western story of the original, the sequel takes inspiration from one of my favorite films of all time; The Last Duel. Rather than be some epic journey, Doc Holliday 2 recounts the same events of a game of Faro in a saloon that led to the alleged murder of Edward Bailey, but through the testimony of three separate people with their own biases. We get Holliday himself, Billy West (Wes Gillum), and Georgia (Tiffany McDonald) each giving their own account of what happened.

It goes to the acting chops of the people involved because they have to play three similar but relatively distinct versions of their own characters. Holliday and Bailey are either slurring drunken scumbag nitwits or proper honorable gentlemen depending on who is telling the story, except Holliday who still portrays himself as kind of a stumbling drunk. There’s twists and turns to keep you invested in the story as it goes along and I was shocked by the ending. Who is telling the whole truth? Probably nobody. It’s entirely left up to the viewer’s conclusion on whose story has the most facts.

The cinematography is a big step up from the first movie, in how scenes are shot and lit that makes everything feel more threatening and foreboding. The script is also a big step up making the actors feel like real people rather than obvious actors reading a script in front of a camera. The soundtrack doesn’t always match the mood of the scene but it is ever present. And like I said, the story pitch itself is a winner. The whole film is essentially shot on two sets, and represents the whole “doing a lot with a little” that good independent films excel at.

If Doc Holliday was the McDonald’s of western movies, Doc Holliday 2 is the locally owned restaurant where the owner’s secret ingredient is a slice of love and regionally sourced beef. And that beef? Walker Haynes. God he’s handsome. I bet he wears really nice cologne and still goes to a barber that uses those straight razors for shaving.

Doc Holliday deserved the 3.9 it has on IMDB and is probably a bad first impression for Bentman’s films, but the sequel? 6.0 is actually insulting. Even considering that IMDB users love shitting on indie films despite also claiming to hate blockbusters for overshadowing indies, this one deserves at least a 7.5 by their skewed metrics. The few reviews I’ve seen on western movie enthusiast blogs agree that Doc Holliday 2 is a massive step up from the original. It’s only too bad that so many of the people who didn’t like the first film probably won’t hunt down the second.

The real travesty of Doc Holliday 2 is that being on Xumo probably carved out a good chunk of the potential audience who might have seen this film on Tubi. But I’m assuming since it’s a Xumo Original they probably also provided some funding, and you get what you can get. Maybe the real Xumo viewership are the friends we made along the way. Also the fact that Doc Holliday 2 is an hour and 13 minutes makes it feel really short.

Rating: A-