The first Hell House LLC began with a beautifully crafted set up, showing the audience that something horrific had happened in the basement of the hotel on October 8th and showing us the scale of the tragedy through various pieces of footage and interviews without giving us too many details of what actually went down. The end had a spectacular pay off. We got to see what happened, but not in still, HD footage that displayed the death of every casualty down there. Oh, no, no. It gave just enough to satisfy certain questions without removing the terrifying mystery.
Part II did quite the opposite. Sure, we got a little bit of foreshadowed mystery when the first snippet of footage of Jessica being questioned by the police began to play halfway through the film. However, by that point, I already didn't much care what happened to her and I was able to predict that she was simply this film's Sara.
The biggest disappointment of all was the final reveal. The boogeyman is not so scary once the lights are on, and the same goes for Andrew Tully. In the original, he was a faceless and unfathomable entity that we knew very little about, working through his puppeteering of apparitions of his victims, his cult members, and props inside the hotel. That made him the perfect monster.
This was ruined in every way. Not only does the audience see him full-on, but characters have a clear dialogue with him, and he even goes on to monologue about his evil plans. Not to mention, said monologue is all information that we had ascertained earlier in the film, making that finale serve no point other than to diminish the audience's fears and dumb things down for us.
I won't even begin to complain about Tully being in the televised debate, as that would take up a vast majority of this review's word count.
I will just say that the televised debate served as a nice break from the ongoing suspense-building scenes from within the hotel and left us with a few mid-story cliffhangers. Unfortunately, the heavy-handed exposition, hackneyed caricatures, and lack of character rounding in regards to Mitchell made these scenes fall flat.
The film did have some pretty decent scares in the middle, but it lacked the slow, creeping build of the first film. Sure you could think, "Why hide the monsters when we've already seen them?" But if that's the explanation then why have a sequel at all?
To be honest, I didn't much care about the characters at all. I lost interest in Molly and Jessica right after their very first scene. The dialogue was awkward and didn't come off as natural, and the characters didn't even become more interesting after that. Mitchell had the most promise after his brief introduction in the first film and his ties to the hotel, but did I believe for a second that Diane's disappearance raised the stakes enough for him to justifiably enter the building he warned everyone to stay away from? No. Not even after the third contrived time he shut down with a haunted stare off into space at the mention of her name.
David, however, I did care about. He was the only reasonably balanced character that was, well, an actual character. As much as it may come across as filler dialogue to some, even his talk of nachos served the purpose of echoing back to conversations amongst the Hell House crew.
Supposedly this is going to be a trilogy. Will I watch the third installment? Absolutely. I loved the first Hell House LLC, and while this sequel doesn't even come close to being as well-crafted, it was still entertaining.
For anyone who was a fan of the first, I do suggest you watch this film. Just don't hold it to the same standards you hold the original to.
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