Also wasted my time on the new low-ambition, low-energy, repetitive, redundant horror flick Brahms: The Boy 2. A particularly awkward title to a sequel to a fairly lame creepy doll horror film from a few years ago. That movie (The Boy) manages to make a tidy profit even though no one particularly loved it… so now we have a sequel nobody asked for and I bet most people won’t have even noticed.
In Brahms (The Boy 2), a wife and her son survive a botched break-in and now the wife (played by Katie Holmes) is scared and the boy isn’t talking. So the family relocates to a house in the English countryside and the boy promptly digs up Brahms… the porcelain doll from the first movie. Is Brahms a possessed spooky doll? Is he actually moving and trying to freak out Katie Holmes or is she suffering PTSD? Is the boy bonding with the doll a healthy sign of recovery? Who created such an eerie porcelain doll in the first place?
All of this is to ultimately say that Brahms: The Boy 2 is a trash, boring, repetitive, redundant film that only exists to scare people who have never once ever seen a horror movie. It does not need to exist, it wastes our time as film goers with boring, uninspired, incompetent jump scares and a thorough lack of suspense. I’m sure someone who has never seen a creepy doll film or pretty much ANY horror film might get something out of the flick… but I’m being super charitable there.
Now, to be fair, they do get two things kind of right. First, there’s a visually interesting reveal of what the Brahms doll really is. It doesn’t do much with it, but at least it looks interesting or mildly creative. The second thing is that it makes a decent sequel to the original movie, even if, in doing so, it betrays that movie’s twist. In the first film, the generic creepy doll movie makes a sudden left turn in the final act that was a minor saving grace to a mediocre film. This sequel tosses that twist into the garbage… though, to be fair, I think the new revelations actually work and kind of retroactively contextualizes that first movie. It’s a lot of effort in the script for so little actual effort put on screen.
So some credit to a really bad movie. It’s not nearly enough to take it out of the early year garbage fire horror movie pile. This is, in fact, the worst of the pile. An unnecessary uninspired sequel to an unnecessary uninspired original. No point in seeing this one at all.
Score: 56