Saturday, January 10, 2015

Movie Review: "The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death" (2015)

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Movie"The Woman in Black: Angel of Death"
Director: Tom Harper
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 38 minutes

Decades after the incidents surrounding the Eel Marsh house, all that went on has been long forgotten. England is fully embroiled in WWII and the cities are constantly bombed by German planes. Children are being evacuated out of the city and relocated to the English countryside. Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox) and Jean Hogg (Helen McCrory) are teachers who chaperone a group of kids that are being relocated to the Eel Marsh House for their safety. As we know Eel Marsh is not a safe place for anyone, let alone children, and as soon as the group arrives, the same things that happened decades earlier begin reoccurring.

Not even 10 days into 2015 and we've already got a contender for one of the worst of the worst movies of the year!

"The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death." Wow, what a strong, compelling title that goes absolutely nowhere and is completely flashy for show only! This movie is so, so boring, guys and gals. It feels less like an intense horror movie and more like a 3-hour long drama. And it's really only an hour and a half. Dear god, how do filmmakers accomplish this so frequently!? Like its predecessor, this sequel is nothing but jump scares, and this go around, they seem more frequent and much louder than last time. The tension and fright are not there in the slightest. On top of this, the whole premise of the movie is dumb as hell. First off, we get that it takes place deep in the middle World War II and because of this, tensions are high, but does everyone need to be such an uptight asshole? It's super unnecessary to both the mood of the movie and the story they are trying to tell itself. Evacuating children and chaperoning them is a really nice thing for Eve Parkins and Jean Hogg to do, especially since some were orphans. Realistically, though, if the intention was to the evacuate children to get them someplace where they were going to get supplies and be safe, would an old, abandoned, creepy ass house across a long stretch of mud road that sometimes gets flooded and becomes un-driveable on a deserted island miles away from a town that is also deserted really be the best place for them!?!? NO, NO, NO. It's probably the worst freaking place for children that we can think of, and yet, no one questioned it? UGH. It's stuff like this that drives us bonkers. Were they just stupid, or completely uneducated about the house in the first place? And come on, the movie tries to say there's no one else nearby that was out of the military fighting age that couldn't fix up the broken, dilapidated parts of the house?! Beyond this dumb plot point, it's basically the same movie as the first only with a female protagonist and no Harry Potter. Eve Parkins walks around outside Eel Marsh, walks around inside Eel Marsh, and walks up and down stairs and in and out of a deserted town the entire movie. And what is this the trend of making every single kid in a horror movie look exactly like Damien from "The Omen," huh? A little difference won't kill anyone! The only thing going for this movie, again, is its setting and scenery, which would be creepy and eerie in another, better circumstance.

The bottom line is that nothing in "The Woman in Black" was scary, so why the exact same story needed to be rehashed baffles us. It sure as hell did not necessitate a sequel! This movie would have been better as a straight to DVD release.

My Rating: 3.5/10
BigJ's Rating: 3.5/10
IMDB's Rating: 5.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 23%
Do we recommend this movie: No.

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