The Rizen: Possession

How best to describe this film? How about confusing? Although most of it consists of two distinct groups of people walking around in the dark getting picked off by zombie-like creatures, there have been similar films that score well, but this one fails at every level. Is it science fiction or occult? A bit of both, apparently, and with more background it might have warranted damning with faint praise. Sadly, there is more background. Although it isn't entirely clear from the dialogue, this is actually a sequel. The first film is even worse.

This movie was packed with action & lots of scares, both psychological & jump scares. I would have loved to give this movie a 10/10, but while it is an incredibly engaging film, at the end you just say "WTF"? There is no story coherence and the payoff seemed to be the ending from another movie that got mistakenly spliced into this one! When I saw the opening credits it listed Ade Edmondson, who I loved as Vivian from The Young Ones. I looked for him the entire movie and never saw him. Then upon doing an image search, I realized the both Ade, and I, have gotten really old and look nothing like our younger selves!

Technically the movie is good. Meaning the acting, effects, sound, etc. The story on the other hand is just an incoherent confusing mess. They tried to do too much with too little time. I got the gist of the overall story and what the event was but the stuff in between was ?????

I didn't hate it.

It is not fast paced.

I had to look at imdb for an explanation. :-) I watched it on Amazon Prime.

It is worth streaming but I wouldn't see it at a theatre.

This movie is listed on Tubi TV as The Facility rather than as The Rizen: Possession. There's no indication that it is a sequel or related to any other movie. I don't know why they listed it like this especially since they also have the first movie. Whatever the reason, it doesn't do this movie any favors. Without the previous movie for context, a lot of what happens in this one just becomes incoherent nonsense. For examples, there are a lot of flashbacks. In some of them you see the actors in different costumes. In some you see somewhat similar looking but clearly different actors. These are the actors from the first movie but it just makes no sense if you haven't seen that. There are a lot of things like that in this movie.

This is a decent sci-fi horror movie but make sure you watch The Rizen first. Otherwise, a lot of this movie won't make a bit of sense.