Fear 2 - Uma Noite de Halloween

STAR RATING:*****Unmissable.****Very Good.***Okay.**You Could Go Out For A Meal Instead.*Avoid At All Costs.

I really should have learned my lesson by now. Horror sequels,no matter how interesting they may sound or how good their intentions may be,never work.

And this heap big pile of babababooshka meant one of the worst halloween night movies I'd had the displeasure of having out in ages. I should have got The Faculty out instead.

I only saw it because I remembered seeing the original ages ago,and was interested in seeing what wonders a sequel could toss up. Well,in some parts,dull,predictable,seen-it-all-before cliches were thrown up like anything. I mean,quarter of the way into it,I was left unimpressively baffled. Wow. He attacks his nutty father's tombstone with an axe,and,when he and his lover walk away,wow,it starts to bleed. How scary.(Bram Stoker's Dracula,anyone?)

And that scene with the snake in the forest was pathetically stupid. A snake could'nt survive in those temperatures. Pah.

On the charecter front,I was most amused by those 2 sexy blonde chicks.

But then,onto good old Morty.

In the original,he was a tortured,sympathetic horror creation who you grew to like towards the end. In this shambles of a sequel,a complete waste of time and money for everyone,he's a metamorphosising,crass,cack handed man like beast ,who quotes tired one liners on his hapless victims. I actually thought he looked like Dolph Lundgren a bit in the cupboard.

Sequels to excellent,sucessful horror films have stank (Candyman 2,An American Werewolf In Paris),but sequels to unknown,unappreciated horror flicks like The Fear are just torture to sit through. I just absolutely could not wait for this to be over.

Utterly unscary,paceless and boring,I would deter you from renting this movie as your halloween treat.*

Those of you who, like me, were disappointed with the original 1995 horror yarn, "The Fear" will find more to be disappointed with in this silly little sequel. It sort of follows a similar plot, but it is impossible to connect to the original, with the exception of the presence of Morty, the mannequin monster made of wood. Here is a brief overview.

Twenty years after Mike Hawthorne (Gordon Currie, in a decent performance) witnesses his father brutally murder his mother and then take his own life, Mike is still suffering from the fear of that day. In hopes of ridding his fear, Mike takes his girlfriend and a bunch of friends up to his grandparents' home. His plan is for everyone to dress up in costumes that represent their fears, and then present the fears to the mannequin Morty. According to an Indian friend, this process is supposed to magically take away one's fear. What Mike doesn't know is that Morty is possessed with his father's spirit, and begins killing off the friends...or is it really Mike himself doing the killings? Who cares?

A have a few troubles with this film. The first lies with Morty. I thought the original made Morty look rather convincing. This time, it is painfully obvious Morty is a man (actor Jon Fedele) in a fake looking suit. This can especially be seen in early scenes, where Morty is still supposed to be inanimate, but if you watch closely you can see him blinking. Another trouble is that most of the characters don't try hard enough. Some of them do, namely Betsy Palmer, of Friday the 13th fame, who was excellent in this film. But most of them don't make the effort or weren't given the chance. Finally, there are the killings. The opening scenes involving ax murders were very convincing. Actually, when I saw them I thought I was in for a good movie. When the second half of the movie arrives, and the killings really start, everything falls to pieces. Deaths are either uncreative, unseen, or foreseen (glimpses of the next scene as Currie has a blackout). One character dies in the end and no one, including the viewer, even notices. While more characterization was needed in the beginning half, it wasn't too bad. The second half was. I think new director Chris Angel got to this point and really didn't know how to shoot the violent scenes, so they turned out real sloppy and pedestrian. A silly ending doesn't help either. Thus, unless you really loved the original and enjoy plucking splinters out from under your skin, you should probably skip "The Fear 2: Halloween Night." Zanatos' score: 4 out of 10.

Five-year-old Michael sees his mother getting axed to death by his serial killer father "The Highwayman," who later commits suicide. "20 years later" grown Mike (Gordon Currie, from PUPPET MASTER 4 and 5) invites seven of his friends to his secluded grandparents home to "master their own fears" at a Halloween night costume party. Morty, a life-size wooden doll kept in the attic by the Indian handyman, becomes possessed by the dead father's spirit and kills them off using their phobias. Characters are thrown out a window, drowned in a toilet, eaten by rats, blown up, etc. Morty morphs into the dad and a tree, walks around and makes stupid wisecracks. After finding a girl chopped up and stuffed in a cardboard box, the characters remain in the house, act cheerful, crack jokes and have sex.

The Morty design is good and Betsy Palmer (Mrs. Voorhees from the original Friday THE 13TH) is surprisingly delightful as the grandmother, but this thing is even more senseless and confusing than the original and is full of false scares, bad acting, brain-dead characters, repeat flashback footage and annoying distorted camera-work. Plus the only two minority characters (the Indian and a half-black girl) are the first to die. BLAH!

It's a strange phenomenon when obscure films are released and somehow they end up getting sequels. How dothese kinds of events happen in the time of the 1990s? When The Fear (1995) came out, it wasn't a smash hit nor did it even gain marginally favorable reviews. It was a horror film that had a unique concept but lacked any kind of vision to help make it feel largely different from that of others in the same genre. The one aspect to the film that still remains a highlight was the antagonist named Morty; the wooden mannequin. Somehow, somewhere, someone found this movie to be groundbreaking and demanded a sequel be made. Not sure how this was accomplished with the absence of social media and internet reviews. But whatever. It's not like it was worth it. This followup is by no means any improvement to the original.

As like the original, the plot is very similar. A group of adults venture into a house for a weekend getaway during the Halloween season. The leader of the group, Mike (Gordon Currie) is seeking to rid himself of post traumatic stress. When he was young, he witnessed his mother's death after his father (Garvin Cross) axed her and kidnapped him. Now he's taking his soon to be wife Peg (Stacy Grant), her brother Chris (MYC Agnew), Mitch (Phillip Rhys), Jennifer (Emmanuelle Vaugier), LisaAnne (Kelly Benson), Ned (Brendan Beiser) and Trish (Rachel Hayward) all to his grandma Mams (Betsy Palmer). There, they plan on all facing their fears with the help of Crow (Byron Chief-Moon) and his friend Morty (John Paul Fedele). Written by Kevin Richards, the script doesn't try anything new with this plot.

There is barely a drive in this plot. The execution by Chris Angel as director has the same setup to that of the first film. All the characters come together for a ceremony to embrace their fears only to have Morty let loose on them. The fears the group have don't even vary from that of its predecessor. What is the point in rehashing the same material? Richard's script doesn't make sense from the beginning either. Mike's father kills his mother and yet when it's displayed on screen, it looks as though Mike's mother stumbled across a stranger who killed her. What was Mike's father doing out in the wilderness? How did Mike escape his rampaging father? None of that is explored or explained. Not even an exposition dump as some people say. What's even worse is how oblivious some characters are.

An example of this is when Crow explicitly says that a certain mystical item needs to be around Morty for it to keep the evil inside it at bay. However when the object is removed without him knowing, he doesn't realize until much later. Really? We can't be this neglectful. Yet even with these problems, there are a couple of noteworthy things. For 1999 and from what the film looked like it had budget wise, the physical and special effects don't look too bad. The Morty prop and suit worn by Fedele is about the same in visual texture as was the old suit from the first film. Although it's a tad redder in color. Sometimes it even looks like when the prop is still, someone is actually sitting in makeup. The special effects for this film are used more for Morty's physical transformations. Whether that be morphing his hands or entire body.

The cinematography to this picture though was rather unimpressive. Taking place in a similar setting to that of the original, nothing feels different about it. Shot by Brian Pearson, the camerawork is okay but just isn't enough to truly make the experience engaging. Mike, the protagonist also suffers from dizzy spells, where the screen will become wavy but that's about the only added feature. Pearson also worked on projects like Final Destination 5 (2011) and Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015). Then there's Robert O. Ragland who composed the score to this franchise (I can't believe I typed that) once more. And it's alright for what it's worth. It's has some deep thumping bass notes at points and can add some suspense to certain scenes. After all he did work on the original movie and Grizzly (1976).

Music and visual effects are really the only highlights. Why not see Morty do cool things right? However, the actors, the characters they play, the script itself and the camerawork are bland and more or less copies of what the original film had already done. It's just an updated rehash of the original.

Twenty years ago, the five years old boy Michael Hawthorne witnessed his father killing his mother with an axe in an empty road and committing suicide later. On the present days, Michael (Gordon Currie) invites his girlfriend Peg (Stacy Grant) and his best friends Chris (Myc Agnew), Jennifer (Emmanuelle Vaugier), Lisa Ann (Kelly Benson), Ned (Brendon Beiser), Mitch Maldive (Phillip Rhys) and Trish (Rachel Hayward) to spend the Halloween in the country with his grandparents in their farm. He asks his friends to wear costumes that would represent their greatest innermost fear, and together with his Indian friend Crow (Byron Chief Moon), they would perform an ancient Indian celebration using the carved wooden dummy Morty (Jon Fedele) that would eliminate their fears forever. The greatest fear of Michael is to become a serial killer like his father, but something goes wrong and Morty turns into his father, killing his friends.

"The Fear: Resurrection" is a disappointing and pointless slash movie that uses the interesting concept of eliminating the greatest innermost fear of each friend before it grows, but in a messy screenplay full of clichés. There are some exaggerated performances, like for example Ms. Betsy Palmer; others very weak, but in general the acting is good. Unfortunately there is no explanation why the dummy is brought to live; further, in spite of being surrounded by close friends, the group does not feel pain or sorrow when each one of them dies. The low-pace along more than fifty minutes could have been used to built a better dramatic situation. In the very end, Michael shows a charm that his father was interested that I have not noticed along the story. I do not know whether the previous reference was edited in the DVD released in Brazil with 87 minutes running time. The special effects are very reasonable for a B-movie. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Fear 2: Uma Noite de Halloween" ("Fear 2: One Night of Halloween")