Two years ago, one of the most jump scare based movies I have ever seen came out, Smile. It has a similar formula to It Follows. An evil entity follows around one person, and once they die, it transfers to another person that is close by. It haunts them for days, and the scares slowly become more intense until the cycle repeats itself. The violence was pretty strong, and the scares were plentiful. So when I saw that there was a second one coming out, I was pretty excited. The first one I consider to be a really good scary movie about trauma and perpetuating its cycle, so it was more than just scares, but can the new one rise to the same heights as its predecessor?
Smile 2 follows a new character, Skye Riley, who is a huge pop star. She is recovering form addiction, and she is also recovering from a severe car crash that resulted in her boyfriend’s death. She is still in pain from the crash physically, so she goes to a drug dealer to get Vicodin to help with her pain, but when she goes this time, her dealer is acting off. When he comes out of the backroom, it is like an invisible force is choking him, then he grabs a plate weight and smashes his face multiple times before he dies, thus passing on the entity to Skye.
Initially, she thinks she is just having bad dreams about the trauma that she had just witnessed, but the visions start to become more pronounced, and of course, this leads to her behavior becoming more erratic. Due to her recent history of addiction people start to question her behavior even more, and this just adds to her stress, because no one believes her. To be fair, it would be totally reasonable to suspect and not believe her, but still, it makes for a frustrating watch. She does find one guy who believes her, and he has a wild plan to get the haunting to stop, and at this point, she has no choice but to try it.
The first Smile and this one were very similar. The biggest difference was the position of power the person had in each. In the original, the entity was haunting a doctor. She still had a beautiful house and a good amount of money, but compared to Skye Riley, their public personas do not compare. So there were clearly more eyes on Skye at all times, whereas the doctor in the previous one just had family and friends that were worried about her, she was not involved in a worldwide tour.
Towards the end it did make me think about if this happened to Taylor Swift. The movie ends with Skye starting to perform her opening concert of the tour, and (SPOILER) she takes her microphone and stabs herself in the eye repeatedly with a big smile on her face. We do not see it happen, but we get to watch the audience’s reaction, which was great. If that was Taylor Swift though, I think there would be millions of girls who would never recover whether they were in attendance for it or not.
One part of the movie that I found funny was that the lights were off in the people’s apartments, like at all times. I thought this was very odd at first, but then I remembered that I keep the lights off in my apartment like all the time, and I watch scary movies all the time, so I guess I cannot judge these people being haunted. The drug dealer, who was losing his mind had his apartment basically in total darkness, but I think if I was losing my mind and seeing people like he was, every light would be on in my house, and they would never be turned off. The entity might still haunt me, but at least I would not jump at every silhouette of a chair, I would clearly know it was a chair. Even when Skye started to get haunted, she basically had the lights off in her apartment until the very end, when she finally decided to turn them all on.
One of the biggest problems with these movies is that they are very repetitive. Not just between the two, but within the movies themselves. It is very much scare rinse repeat. Over and over, and the issue is literally cyclical, so it makes it all too easy to do the same thing over and over. So it was nice to have the two year gap between them, but even still, this movie did not need to be over two hours. Most horror movies, this one included, are meant to be between 90 and 110 minutes long. So I do hold that against the movie.
What it did better than basically any other movie this year was make me jump and yell out. They even made the scares predictable, I knew that they were coming, and that any second, something freaky was going to happen, but even with the knowledge, they still got me every time! It had to of been at least five times when I jumped, probably more. It even made my heart pound. One of those movies where you can feel your whole body tensing up, and once the scare is over, you have to remind yourself to release the tension. Even the sound mixing was great. The sound that was produced when the dude smashed his face with the plate weight was sickening, and the visual was as well.
The score definitely helped to build the scares. It was so odd and off putting that it made the mood so much better, but there was also the pop music element. Just like Trap, they had some original pop songs created for the movie, and they did sound legit. There were even a couple of music video scenes, one of which had a scare in it, so it was a little necessary, but there were so many other scares. It felt weird to have what amounted to a whole music video into this already bloated movie. It was not bad, but I do not come to scary movies for pop music videos.
Overall, this was a really good scary movie. I do not feel like it advanced much from the first one, but it does not really have to, it is a movie centered on creating scares, and it accomplishes that goal magnificently. It is just a little long, but I would recommend watching it. At the end it becomes a little muddled on what is actually happening or not, but when it comes to the final scene, it is effective in a horrifically funny kind of way. I gave it 3.5 stars. A fun time at the movies around Halloween.
Comments