“… essentially a rehash of the first film, but with less interesting characters…”

Since my last review was about the 2012 ‘hit’, The Woman in Black, I decided to watch its sequel The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is a film that takes place many years after the first film, specifically during World War II. The film follows a group of children who had to be evacuated from London due top the increasing danger of being killed by bombings that are plaguing the city. Where else for them to go but the house where a murderous ghost has been documented by hundreds of people? So the group gets to the house and then, surprise surprise, children start to die. That’s really all the movie is about, I just saved you like 90 minutes.

But in all seriousness The Woman in Black 2: Angle of Death is not a film that needed to be made. The entirety of the film follows Eve Parkins, a caregiver of the children, discovering that there is a ghost, discovering who the ghost is, then discovering a way to stop the ghost. Sound familiar? Well it should if you have seen the The Woman in Black because it is the same plot. That’s right, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is the Hangover 2 of horror films; so if you have seen the first film there is really no reason to watch this sequel.

Unfortunately I did watch the sequel, and besides the fact that it is pretty much the same story as the first film, there really isn’t much else to it. This film, much like the first, starts off very slow and makes you get really bored before the scares start. The problem is that when the scares do start, they aren’t really scary. I mean sure, I jumped a couple of times but I wasn’t really scared; does that make sense? Every ‘scare’ in this film was only momentary, and then it took a while to get another one. The only ‘redeeming’ part about the film was a section toward the end that reminded me of something like Jacob’s Ladder, but that scene really only lasts for a couple of minutes and then we are back to the dull jump scares.

So without any scary parts, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death was pretty boring. All we did was watch new characters learn shit that we already knew from watching the first film, and that is not entertaining in the slightest. I guess this film had an obstacle to overcome, and that is the fact that there is no Daniel Radcliffe to carry this film, but holy shit it was so lackluster. Even something easy, like the look of The Woman in Black was fucked up multiple times. Sometimes she was fat, sometimes she looked like a dude in a dress, sometimes she had scars on her face, sometimes she didn’t. I started to wonder if the movie should have been called Women in Black. Really this movie is a mess.

The rest of the review will contain spoilers for The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death. If you haven’t yet seen the film, but want to for some reason, I would recommend skipping to my rating.

So I usually don’t discuss spoilers for movies but something really bothered me with this one. In my review for The Woman in Black I mentioned that the ending didn’t make much sense to me, but I didn’t elaborate. Well the same issue occurred in this film and it really stumped me. So the main character got pregnant when she was young, and then her baby was taken from her by the doctor. This part makes sense because it is explained that she was young and not married. What I get stuck on is why exactly the ghost is terrorizing this woman. We already know that the ghost is the mother of a child who was ‘given’ to another woman. This woman then ‘let’ the child die, which is why the ghost is pissed. But wouldn’t the ghost be sympathetic to the main character in this film? Both of them lost a child but for some reason this fucking ghost decides that her losing a child was a tragedy, but the main character losing a child was her own fault. It just makes absolutely no sense to me, and if anyone could shed some light on this it would be greatly appreciated.

Ultimately The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is a disappointment. It is essentially a rehash of the first film, but with less interesting characters and less entertaining actors. The scares are temporary, and almost funny at points, and something as simple as character design is super inconsistent. It just makes me wonder what the hell happened.

I give The Woman in Black 2: Angle of Death a D