pasithea

Spoiler-free review.

Since I'm on call for the weekend for work, I went and saw this at the midnight movie last night because there was less chance I'd be paged and have to leave in the middle of the film.

I love love love love loved the first film, and I knew that ment my expectations for the second film would be too high and I was setting myself up for a disappointment, but I tried to put that fear aside and go just to enjoy the film.

I must say that on the whole, the effects over overwhelming. The crew of the Dutchman is incredibly cool and would give HP Lovecraft nightmares.

But there was something subtly wrong with the whole movie. I realized about a half hour in that it was the lighting. Where the lighting in the previous film had stuck to a silvery moonlight theme and made everything just a little ghostly, this film was done in a harsh natural sunlight sort of lighting that made everything appear sort of redder and more gritty and unpleasant.

There was still a lot of neat and fun stuff in the movie but on the whole, it was just a rehash of gimmicks that were fun in the first film rearranged in a way that made me feel like the script had been written by the marketting people and it just lacked a lot of the fun of the first film. It also suffers badly from middle-film-itus and, it shows that it was a sequel made from a film that wasn't really written to have a sequel, so the writers were stuck scrambling for 'what happens in the lives of these people?' after the first film.

Still enjoyable to watch, just not nearly as good as the first film and likely not as good as the 3rd film will be.