Nightwatch - Demons Are Forever ('Nattevagten – Dæmoner går i arv') (2023)

You need to have seen the 1994 original to appreciate the genius of this sequel that takes the themes and look of the original and cements them as classic by reworking the story with a new gender politic, putting Fanny Leander Bornedal in the lead role as the daughter of Nikolaj Coster-Waldau's character in the original - she takes on the morgue nightwatch job to better understand her parents' ordeal - and just when you think things are going to be too same-same (moths in the light fittings, alarm lights that threaten to go off...) this gnarly, twisted mystery really goes places!

★★★★☆

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Psycho II (1983)

Bringing Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates back to the screen twenty-three years after the original Hitchcock classic required an audaciousness you really have to admire - especially given this sequel sees him released from prison and getting a kitchenhand job (!) - and it is surprising, given this absurd setup, how strong it is at the outset, nostalgically recalling the original, with a short-haired heroine stumbling into the danger of a gothic hilltop home and neighbouring motel, taking showers and discovering peepholes while Californian cops in pilot-shades drain swamps, explore cellars, and tail suspects through town; yet bringing Bates back also sadly requires some clumsy writing in which grisly murder is committed with zero clean-up, bodies vanish, cops scoff and dismiss witness accounts of murder in a famed murder house, and lots of other highly unlikely behaviour occurs from characters maintaining an impossible flippancy about their close proximity to a famed serial killer - it is all the mess of writers desperately trying to perpetuate an unlikely series with, by the film's end, a complete cleaning of the slate and a reversion back to the beginning of Psycho to where it all started.  

★★★☆☆

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Halloween Kills (2021)

A "kill" isn't over until the camera has come to rest on the blood pooling in the cavity left by, say, a fluorescent tube or a broken stairpost in this especially unedifying 2021 Halloween movie that starts up right where 2018's Halloween left off (Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode is being rushed to hospital believing herself to have killed Michael Myers for good) and ends some time later that same loooong Halloween night after the townfolk of Haddonfield form lynch mobs to hunt Michael Myers (still alive, afterall -- or, well, nevermind...) while Laurie literally does nothing - she gets up from her hospital bed just once, only to get straight back in again to spout some never-before-uttered dubious Michael Myers mythology and that's all.

.

★★☆☆☆

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Don't Breathe 2 (2021)

Well, they've certainly fulfilled the brief, taking all that ugliness of the first movie (remember when things turned unexpectedly nasty in the basement?) and fashioning a really equally vile sequel in which that blind ex-Navy Seal kidnapper, rapist and murderer in number one returns, the victim of another home invasion but this time a kind of antihero as he resists the efforts of a group of men trying to kidnap his daughter, a crime that starts out mega-gory and ends with sickening "who thinks up this stuff?" gothic horror involving, wait for it, involuntary organ donation, some Grande Dame Guignol psycho-biddy grotesquery, hacked off arms and popped eyeballs.

★★★☆☆

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Alien Vs Predator - Requiem (2007)

In the second of this daft series of movies that pits Predators from Predator movie against Aliens from Alien - though scene after dark, murky scene fails to distinguish which is which - the action shifts from the first movie's subterranean Antarctic pyramid to small-town USA, where way too many human characters blur together while a Predator, again sporting woeful Amstrad CPC-quality predator-vision, hunts Aliens whose number and purpose for marauding the town remain maddeningly unclear - they are just having a bad day, maybe.

★☆☆☆☆

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Halloween II (2009)

I thought director Rob Zombie got away with his first Halloween remake, taking viewers inside the head of masked crazy Michael Myers and giving the killer a sympathetic backstory and rationale for his killing in his adult life, but this 2009 sequel confirms the director is trying too hard with his vision for the slasher series - in every scene, Zombie distracts with his communications direct to viewer that what he is doing is arthouse: messages are graffitied on every wall and unlikely posters appear in every room pronouncing cultural subversiveness (a victim of a serial killer has a poster celebrating Charles Manson on her bedroom wall, really?), and even Weird Al Yankovich turns up as Zombie attempts to culturally contextualise what is better suited as a cartoony slasher for teens...and the results are a ridiculous mess: viewers share in the killer's delusory thoughts and are privy to manifestations of his madness in the form of mother, dressed like Legolas, leading a white horse on their journey back to Haddonfield, all the while as a separate movie, a misguided comedy, is spliced in here and there featuring Malcolm McDowell's Doctor Loomis as a whiny fame-whore, suddenly not the Doctor Loomis of previous iterations, in a storyline unrelated to the whole nor relevant to the greater series.

★☆☆☆☆

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Queen Of The Damned (2002)

The last embarrassment - the last nail in the coffin, so to speak - is the sight of Matthew Newton in a Paddlepop Lion wig trying to explain, in his only line right near the end, why one of the other vampires has turned to stone; I didn't hear what he said (the audio throughout is terrible) and, like me, you won't care anyway after this dreary adaptation of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles book has everyone (notably Aaliyah and Keira Knightley -- oops I mean Stuart Townsend) trying so hard to be slinky, sexy vampires that watching it is like being the fully-clothed party guest at an orgy suddenly underway - you're not sure what you are still doing there, and everyone is so intent on what they are doing no one seems very interested that you're watching; filmed in part at an impressive-looking Mont Salvat in Melbourne, the Australian production forgets you are there and, worse, forgets to tell you what or who you should be rooting for: Lestat, the vampire who has woken himself up in the Noughties to become a nu metal rockstar, or humankind represented briefly by a beach violinist, a redheaded vampire researcher, and enthusiastic throngs at a metal concert - and no-one else - or perhaps we are supposed to care about some of the vampires and not others - Matthew Newton's, maybe, or the jazz-ballet-miming ones throughout?

★☆☆☆☆

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Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

After the misguided pagan mythology world-building of the third movie, Halloween is back to being just a grisly day on the calendar in this simple "Michael Myers comes home" fourth episode that has the masked killer heading once again to Haddonfield, Illinois, this time to kill, for no clear reason except perhaps that Jamie Lee Curtis was too expensive, Laurie Strodes's daughter (Michael's niece), a young girl whose protection from the madman depends, sadly, on a bungling loser-in-love babysitting step-sister, a gang of trigger-happy vigilante hicks, and of course Donald Pleasence's now scarred and maimed and always-too-late plodding-far-behind-for-a-third-outing-now Dr Loomis. 

★★★☆☆

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Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Like most third movies, Halloween III is the one that opts for unrestrained series-perpetuating exposition over simply doling out another episode and here not only do we not get another simple "Michael Myers comes home" episode, the masked killer does not even feature in a departure from the slasher horror series that, with its pair of investigators heading into a toy factory to find it full of brainwashed henchmen and a diabolical secret (mass production of Halloween masks with brainwashing microchips in them!) is more suited to an episode of 70s TV series "The Avengers" with slasher fans being told suddenly that Halloween is not just a calendar event but a pagan backstory.

★★☆☆☆

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Johnny English Reborn (2011)

My attention strayed and then irritation set in as this British spy spoof, the second in a series of three Johnny English movies but the first I've tried to watch, went on and on and on in such cookie-cutter fashion that it doesn't really ask to be watched at all - a glance at the poster tells you everything you already knew about the James Bond-style opening sequence, the ho-hum scene at the hi-tech spy tools development facility, the repetitive car and boat chases, and the unpsychedelic Austin Powers, a rubbery-faced Pink Panther, at the centre of all the, er, action.

★★☆☆☆

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Oh, God! Book II (1980)

As in the 1977 original, George Burns' God's strategy for spreading the word of his existence is to appear before doubters and wow them with some 80s-cinema SFX...but not until after he has first driven one unfortunate soul to an asylum with a diagnosis of delusional psychosis, and in this sequel the poor individual isn't John Denver but Tracy Richards, an 11 year old who really should be practising spelling and coming to terms with her parents' divorce, not god-bothered, but she is such a delight, her friend Shingo is so relaxed and natural, their interactions are so well acted, and the movie is so gently amusing and unsanctimonious that the ridiculousness of God's methods doesn't matter: this is a pleasure.

★★★☆☆

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Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

The sequel to Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist of 1982 is the 1986 release, Brian Gibson's Poltergeist II, a movie variously and bewilderingly about car-whispering, teenage smile correction, cult worship, family togetherness, curses, burial chambers, possessed toys, parasitic infection, domestic abuse, alcohol abuse, ghosts, trauma, paranormal investigation, shamanism, Native American steam bath rituals, and evil, and it doesn't make even one word of sense but has some neat effects a la the original.

★★☆☆☆

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Now You See Me 2 (2016)

That huge ensemble of characters from number one, all deeply earnest about their craft - magic - which unites them in a fraternity as boysy, ridiculous and self-important as the Illuminati, reunites for this preposterous sequel that pits the Four Horsemen in a magic war with a tech wizard, except this is cinema magic, not magic magic, so there is no 'reveal' to justify the movie's long tangled string of events and you can't possibly care about what happens given the "anything goes" nature of the plot and the fact it all goes on in a one-note bombastic patter and that everything, even years in jail, might simply, quite ridiculously, be part of the slow burn.

★★☆☆☆

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Scream 3 (2000)

This third instalment of the Scream series continues to inventively postmodernise the slasher flick by taking yet another step back, this time setting the gruesome events against the backdrop of a slasher flick being made within a slasher flick, so there are now lookalike actors playing the actors and movie sets of the movie sets, but boy it is a long episode and it tries so hard that all its energy goes out the window well before the movie's drawn-out conclusion.

★★☆☆☆

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Insidious Chapter 2 (2013)

Don't expect to be a Rhodes Scholar in the ways of the Further after watching this - just how people pass into and through director James Wan's evil limbo, the Further, introduced in the original Insidious but further elaborated upon in this sequel, seems to no longer depend upon a character being dead - alive or injured or even merely remembered people can hang out there now, so more than before it resembles something like a train station, but still it is never satisfactorily explained - and there are other areas lacking elucidation: scene by scene you'll have trouble keeping track of whose house everyone is in - the Lamberts' or Elise's? - and you'll become dizzy trying to keep track of all the versions of Patrick Wilson's character, Josh, who appears simultaneously as a kid, as an adult, as an adult in memories, as an adult in the Further, as an imposter in each of those places, in flashback sequences as each of those incarnations; and would someone please pick up that baby walker because I don't want to watch a fourth and fifth adult come down those stairs to investigate the piano only to get a jump when the baby walker comes alive with noise and light, again.

★★☆☆☆

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Scary Movie 2 (2001)

The especially sober moments in this laugh-free horror movie spoof are any of the scenes featuring Chris Evans as the repulsive-looking manservant of a haunted house, and the scenes in which the homosexuality of Shawn Wayans' character is repeatedly offered up sans comedic effort because apparently this is a hilarious thing in itself.

☆☆☆☆☆ (No stars)

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Wolf Creek 2 (2013)

It is as gruesome as it can possibly be, which should please torture porn fans, but this Wolf Creek sequel irritates more than it scares: scenes change from day to night and back again with abandon, victims spend inordinate amounts of time sitting and waiting for more horror to be inflicted upon them instead of fighting back or running away - and when they run away, they run the wrong way or run in the headlights of a pursuing car - and worst of all, the movie makes Mick Taylor, the psychotic Crocodile Dundee of the original, more like a dogged Terminator robot from the future, with the director clearly less concerned with presenting a satisfactory horror movie experience than with wanting to immortalise his villain ahead of who knows how many more sequels I won't be watching.

★★☆☆☆

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Airplane II: The Sequel (aka Flying High II) (1982)

Ted Striker, Elaine and Captain Clarence Oveur are again aboard a doomed flight, this time to the moon, in this lesser sequel to 'Airplane!' (Flying High) that has plenty of dopey laughs in its first half but like the Mayflower One, short circuits and comes crashing down in its second.

★☆☆☆☆

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Terminator 2 Judgment Day (1991)

In this second movie of the ever-growing Terminator series, Schwarzenegger reprises his role of assassin robot from the future only this time he is fighting with, not against, the Connors: tortured and muscly Sarah and her son John, future leader in the war against the machines but here a petulant live-action Bart Simpson rascal, are being hunted by an all-new liquid metal Skynet threat, and the chase is a ripping action story only slightly marred by the movie's persistently flat affect and some inconsistency in the liquid metal robot's functions.

★★★★☆

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The Hangover 2 (2011)

Las Vegas was a better setting for these amnesiac partiers; their all-too-similar antics in this sequel's Bangkok brings to mind badly behaved football teams on season end breaks to Thailand, all obsessed with semen, erections, and homosexual intercourse, and the monkey isn't as good as the tiger, and the tattoo isn't as good as the dentist's knocked out teeth, the missing brother not as good as the missing groom, etc..

★★☆☆☆

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