Movie Reviews

This sequel to the 2012 original starts off in the confessional booth where a former deputy sheriff (James Ransone), who was involved with the Oswalt case from the first movie, wants to get some things of his chest. He’s been burning down the houses that were marked for death in an effort to stop the demon Bughuuul from abducting more children. His research leads him to yet another house, which was supposed to be empty, but where he finds single mom Courtney (Wayward Pines’ Shannyn Sossamon) and her two nine year-old sons, Dylan (Robert Daniel Sloan) and Zach (Dartanian Sloan) instead. They are on the run from Courtney’s abusive husband, who shows up shortly after our nameless former deputy sheriff arrives.

Meanwhile Dylan and Zach end up divided, after Dylan starts getting nightmares and ends up making nightly visits to the basement where he’s watching snuff films along with a bunch of kiddy ghosts, who have promised him the nightmares will stop once he’s seen all the movies. This, of course, is not true. All of these kids are victims of Bughuul and were tricked into killing their families and filming it. This is, as a stereotypically nervous egghead scientist explains to Ransone's character, an "aesthetic appreciation of violence," one of many ways Bughuul's victims ostensibly pay tribute to him.

Does any of this make sense to you? Nope? Damn right it doesn’t. Director Ciaran Foy and co-writers Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill seem to have come up with some kind of storyline because well, you need one to make a movie and then used some of the elements from the first movie (the demon that suddenly pops up behind a character, the snuff films) and then called it a day.

Sure, you’ll jump out of your seat a couple of times. Not because the movie is scary, but because they turn the volume way up. It’s a cheap way to scare people and it’s used most often by people who know they made a pretty crappy sequel.