The Houses October Built 2

It took 1 hour and 10 minutes for this horror movie to have anything even resembling horror. The plot twist was fun to watch but it's pretty bad in retrospect. The first one's superior (even though it isn't good, either).

The first hour of the film feels so empty like you paid for a haunted house just to find it's abandoned.

Same as the first film but not as good.

While it's still a step down from the first in terms of story & really in terms of characters, too, it's still above terrible. The chemistry of the cast is on display throughout & they all turn in decent enough performances, & the exploration of new & different haunts is pretty enjoyable on its own, Unfortunately, the Blue Skeleton plotline is really hard to care about because it's so lazily & sloppily written. Ultimately, this never really justifies its existence, & feels unneeded.

By the end - for itself and retrospectively subverting the first film - this refuses horror as death-torture-pain in favour of a critique of social relations remade as attention economies, organised as commodified processes in relation to unverifiable imagery, posing as authentic access to the real. In other words, the movie is a self-critique and finally one realises NOTHING ELSE, not decorated by violence or the death of secondary characters. Just this critique. Thus tipar's response here.

And we have to expect more than an hour to see something. I stopped watching after an hour of anything even close to Horror.