Last week, I somehow hit upon watching horror movie sequels, and I watched 8 of them. It did not go very well:
- Ready or Not 2: Here I Come takes the very simple (and kind of silly) premise of the first movie and really runs with it. Never mind that there isn’t a lot of room to run with, necessarily—did I mention it was a silly premise?—but it’s more fun than it has any right being, thanks largely to supporting players like Sarah Michelle Gellar and Elijah Wood.
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- Dracula’s Daughter doesn’t really work as a sequel to Dracula, much less specifically the 1931 version, but it tries doing some interesting things that let it stand on its own.
- Children of the Damned looks decent enough, and flirts with a few interesting ideas, but it mostly just swaps between talking too much or not at all.
- The first movie in the series was a little confused in its tone, so I guess Slumber Party Massacre II just does what any sequel would do and ramps everything up several notches. But the end result is borderline incomprehensible. It’s not so much that it isn’t scary as a horror movie—though it isn’t—it’s that by the end it’s entirely unclear what, if anything, is actually supposed to be happening or why. The rock and roll themes, while easily the best part of the movie, feel half-baked and tacked on, and the whole thing is just a weird waste of time.
- When a Stranger Calls Back doesn’t just have gaps in its logic, it has wide chasms. There are moments, early in the film, that almost work, largely because they simply replicate the things that almost worked about the first movie, and I think the cast, particularly Jill Schoelen, is pretty good. But the twists the movie takes are just so laughably bad.
- In their review, Empire said A Return to Salem’s Lot “is offensively bad in every department and should be left to rot in a vault somewhere.” They were being far too kind.
- Anthony Perkins acquits himself reasonably well as a director with Psycho III—sometimes because of, sometimes in spite of, the knowing nods to Hitchcock—but the movie never justifies its existence, not even as well as the second film in the series, and the whole thing falls a little flat.
- Fright Night Part 2 is confused and kind of lifeless for most of its run, then ends kind of badly. I don’t have amazing fondness for the first movie, but I remember it being a lot more fun than this.
