A Haunted House 2

At one point of this film, Marlon Wayans laments, "Why do they keep on making Scary Movie sequels without the Wayans Brothers?  They all suck now!" This is an obvious jab at the horror spoof franchise that Marlon himself helped create back in 2000, but was booted off of after one sequel.  I would like to say that I have seen all five Scary Movie films, and yes, most of them have been terrible.  However, they are nowhere near as bad as A Haunted House 2.  Nobody involved with this film has the right to criticize any other film, because chances are, they are better than this.

I know it's only April, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this will be the worst comedy of 2014, and easily one of the worst of the year.  There's no way another movie can reach the levels of just not trying that A Haunted House 2 does.  The movie surpasses being merely bad, and achieves a certain level of cinematic torture that I hope never to have to sit through again.  Am I exaggerating?  Well, let me tell you, that's all I could think to myself during the scene when Marlon Wayans spots a creepy doll named Abigail (a spoof of the Annabelle doll from The Conjuring) sitting on his bed, and he immediately throws off his clothes, and starts having wild sex with it for a good three minutes straight.  And then, later on, we get to see him do it to the doll again.  By the third time the movie was forcing me to watch him violate the damn doll, I was willing to pay someone good money as long as they would promise me I'd never have to look at Marlon Wayans' naked rear end ever again.

Wayans' idea of comedy may not mirror your own.  Do you find animal cruelty funny?  Well, you'll crack up when his dog is crushed to death by a safe, and when his family tries to surprise him with another dog to replace it, he winds up viciously murdering it.  How about police brutality?  There's a scene where I think the gag is supposed to be that the police show up, and start beating the life out of a character for no reason.  Tired, insensitive racial humor about blacks, Mexicans, and white people?  This movie's got it by the boatload.  Does the sight of people having rough sex with each other leave you in hysterics?  You may bust a gut by the time this movie's over.  Given his performance in this film, Marlon Wayans seems to think that screaming his lines and constantly mugging at the camera like a child on a sugar rush is the height of comedy.  I'm sure he's capable of more, but he refuses to show it here.

Is there a plot?  Does it matter?  The answers to those questions are "kind of" and "no".  Set one year after the events of the first movie, Malcolm (Wayans) has moved on from his demon possessed girlfriend, and is now living with his new girlfriend, Megan (Jaime Pressly), and her two kids.  As soon as they move into their new home, the paranormal activity starts up again, with their teen daughter becoming obsessed with a mysterious box she finds in the house, and the young boy hanging out with an "imaginary friend" named Tony, who inspires the boy to have tea parties and dress in fairy princess clothes.  Malcolm also discovers some old films up in the attic, which display an evil demon attempting and failing to kill innocent people in various ways.  What is the connection?  Nothing, really, other than it's a cheap way to tie together elements of Paranormal Activity, Sinister, The Possession, The Last Exorcism Part 2 and the previously mentioned The Conjuring.

Look, I've long resigned myself to the fact that parody movies no longer actually parody elements of films, but rather just borrow famous scenes from them, and then add jokes about oral sex and bodily fluids.  But this movie doesn't even seem to be trying in any way.  There are no rules to the game that this movie wants to play.  It's just a series of scenes based on other movies, and the filmmakers hope we will laugh out of recognition, and then laugh even more when Marlon Wayans starts having nasty sex with something or someone.  We don't laugh, but the movie just keeps on trying, almost as if it thinks we're missing the point.  This kind of repetition is fatal to a comedy, and doubly so for a spoof.  Imagine if Mel Brooks just kept on doing the same jokes over and over in his movies.  Do you think Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein would be remembered as classics today?  Those movies were smart, and knew what satirical targets they were aiming for.  This movie doesn't even know what it's trying to do most of the time.

There is not one single second of A Haunted House 2 that is worth watching.  Not one joke that draws a laugh or a smile.  It is incompetent, it is ugly, and it is mean-spirited.  Just writing about it is only going to draw more attention to the film, so I'm going to seize the moment, and stop talking about it right now.

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