The Strangers – Chapter 2 Review

"The Strangers - Chapter 2" was filmed alongside last year's "Chapter 1," with "Chapter 3" still unreleased. The interwebs tells me all three were to be released in 2024, so I don't know what happened there. I have no idea what happened behind the scene, and to not commit a critic-sin, I can't say what happens onscreen. What I can say is that this sequel is bad. Awful. Dreadful. Boring. Dumb. Bloated. And perhaps most damning, completely unscary. I sat in a mostly empty theater stone-faced, unflinching to any of the myriad of alleged jump-scares, growing increasingly annoyed at just how monotonous the whole production ended up being. It's not merely just bad, but artistically inert, unable to even become so-bad-it's-good. 

This is the worst kind of film, so passionateless and mechanical, showcasing just what a hack director Renny Harlin, once a decently respected director, has become. This is the man who made what is probably Hollywood's second best shark movie for crying out loud!

A part of me would love to hate this film, but it is so ruthlessly hollow an experience that I just couldn't muster up any emotions. Like a VHS without any film, this is an empty husk where a movie should be.

The plot, sure, we can get that out of the way. The sole survivor of the first chapter, Maya (Madelaine Petsch) is recovering in a nearby hospital. She wakes to learn her fiance Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), who was also attacked, was not so lucky. This should be a touching moment, but at least he doesn't have to suffer through this dreck.

Maya would likely have lived a normal life then, but then the local sheriff and Deputy (Richard Brake and Pedro Leandro, respectively), have to go and yap about the girl who lived in the local diner. (A place so busy you'd swear it's the town's only restaurant.) Does that mean the three killers also frequent the eatery? Bold of you to assume such basic questions would be answered. 

Because the police don't bother having a guard to protect a woman who barely survived a deadly home invasion, that very night, the masked killers swarm the hospital, which is multiple stories large yet we only ever see, like, four people working there. She's awake because of a nightmare, then her phone rings, an unknown number. She answers it, only to hear one of the masked assailants on the other end. Then she hears a voice outside her room, a man who sounds to be being killed. What's a negative one-dimensional horror movie heroine to do? Call the cops? Pull the fire alarm? No silly, she tries to escape. Of course moments later, only after the power is cut does she try and call. Naturally, there's no cell reception then. Frustrated? Just wait til it happens again!

Anyway, Maya desperately tries to hide somewhere in the hospital, eventually slipping into the morgue. She squeezes next to a dead body in one of those freezer things just before the masked man with the ax walks in. He knows she's somewhere and begins checking each of the cold corpse coolers when he stops, staring directly at the one she's in. He pauses only because the filmmakers mistook idiocy for tension, but then a hapless nurse walks in, who's quickly chopped down. She leaves once the man in the burlap sack goes to hide the body, but I kept thinking to myself, what a great hiding place! She gets to lie down, it's not too hot PLUS she gets a little vent to peak out of, so she can scope the room for when the cops or whoever come by. That, and the killers would no doubt not check a room they already cleared, especially with those tempting woods right next door just begging horror movie characters to run around in.

Maya (of course) leaves and escapes outside into the rainy night, no doubt seduced by the idea of being in a wet hospital gown in the dark. Some plot happens and she flags down nurse Danica (Brooke Johnson) and her friend, who say she's safe now and that she can stay with them. Never did it occur to her to try and figure out how one of her patients escaped, but there I go again with my logic. Maya has a panic attack once they pick up two men, thinking these four are the killers. (Nevermind the fact that there are only three murderers but whatever.)

So like anyone with stitches would do, she steals a knife, boots and some medical supplies and lunges out of a moving vehicle. The foursome pull over and try to find her, but she's just hidden herself far too well behind a dying log to be spotted. Hide-and-seekers just hate to see her coming.

More plot happens and then, and I'm not making this up, the masked ax man lets out a wild boar, who quicky finds and attacks her. Why he didn't follow the animal is never explained. (I'm holding out that they'll answer this mystery in part 3.)

Then after some more plot, and Maya awakes in the care of Danica from before, her wounds cleaned and stitched, but what's this? Why, she's in her panties, so cue scenes of her hardly clothed buttocks, just for fun. In a peverse way, it's the best part of the movie. A sad, depressingly lifeless movie that is so relentlessly unexciting that it could inspire someone who has never read anything in their life to pick up a book and go to town.

One time had to get my license from the DMV, where I waited outside in the chilly November weather: it was more exciting than this. It doesn't help that the ending, what should be the "big reveal," is so poorly handled that you have no idea the "who's" and "why's." With its hour and a half or so runtime feels like three, "The Strangers - Chapter 2" is a cinematic dead-zone.

The Conjuring: Last Rites Review

"The Conjuring" films have their work cut out for them, considering a quick internet search shows, somehow, about half the population believes in the paranormal. I am firmly not in that camp, so smart people like me have to sit and watch make-believe in hopes of entertainment. And this fourth entry, subtitled "Last Rites," is as goofy as they come.

The film opens with Ed and Lorraine Warren, two real-life paranormal investigators and likely con-artists, in an antique shop of sorts, after the owner is found dead by hanging. A pregnant Lorraine decides to investigate, hearing the voices that allegedly drove the old man to his suicide, stumbles upon a mirror, one with three faces carved into the wood at the top. She touches it, lots of loud noises are produced and she's induced. Now at the local hospital, doctors believe she has a miscarriage, but thanks to the power of prayer, their little baby girl takes her first breath. It's all very sweet until you realize this is a horror movie, and babies don't have the best track record in this territory. 

Stars Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson (who's facial hair is not quite ready to commit to actual mutton chops) reprise their roles as the paranormal pairing, now since retired from a life of ghostbusting. And when their now-grown daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) returns home from, I dunno college I suppose, new boyfriend in tow named Tony (Ben Hardy), it all becomes very sitcom. Aside from the fact that the family keeps a room locked away in their house littered with purportedly haunted items, of course.

Simultaneously, we follow the Smurl family, a poor and of course religious family of eight living in Pennsylvania. Their daughter Heather (Kíla Lord Cassidy) is seen having her confirmation ceremony, which I'm assuming is something god-fearing people do to try and get on the invisible man's good-side, then thusly gifted the aforementioned mirror, and, I dunno, that ends up inviting demons in. Or ghosts. Or spirits. Or something, I paid attention, I truly did I swear.

The teenager suspects something bad about the mirror, bringing it to the trash one night with the help of her sassy sister Dawn (Beau Gadsdon). The garbage men pick it up and their big truck smashes it, and then the demon fun begins. People float above their beds, a freaky old woman holds toys and phone cords are yanked. (Oh did I forget to mention this takes place during the eighties?) You'd think this is when the Warren's would be called in, but then the runtime wouldn't be able to exceed two hours, so here we are.

But their cries to the local news do attract the attention of Father Gordon (Steve Coulter), a good friend of Ed and Lorraine, or so this fourth movie in a franchise says. (You would think child services would also hear about kids being in constant danger, but I digress.) Their house remains haunted for months, and since they're destitute, are unable to move out. I imagine they're not all that well-liked since they never try to stay with friends or family. Gordon almost immediately detects somethings wrong, but due to plot he ends up killing himself. And for some reason, Judy takes it upon herself to travel to PA and try and help figure out what happens to Gordon. You know, what the police should be doing, but cops just keep back crowds back in movies like this.

So her parents and boyfriend-turned-fiance travel to the Smurl residence, and up until then, I hadn't actively disliked the flick all that much. But then characters lurk about alone in the dark when they shouldn't, which would be impossible considering the tiny house homes eight people! And it happens constantly, so often in fact that I had to keep my intense urge to scream at the screen contained. You would think they'd wait until its light out, grab a buddy and then enter a room where a mysterious voice echoes.

Lorraine just lumbers around looking concerned, and Ed and his sideburns speak in doomy monologues; it's all so self-indulgent. And unfortunately, not all that scary. The same problem that plagued entry number three, that one quickly notices the pattern: someone goes somewhere they shouldn't, the music gets all tense then stops until a monster jumps out. When the film finds an interesting location for all this, sure, it can be fun. A scene in a dressing room is interesting and well done, but come on, another haunted house?

But yes, in the end the plot revolves around a haunted mirror, which in itself isn't all that silly, but what is is when the furniture physically moves and attacks; it is so unbelievably stupid to see veteran actors like Wilson and Farmiga have to combat a hunk of wood. A satire maybe could have made it work, or some broad comedy even, but the filmmakers instead settled on the funless and pretentious.