Review of The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (2014) by Thequietgamer — 19 May 2016

A disappointing follow up to a genuinely good and scary horror movie. The plot itself is fairly decent. It fails to establish the necessary connection between Phoebe Fox's "Eve" and the orphan "Edward" (Oaklee Pendergast), which ends up being crucial to the whole thing, but for the most part it's solidly written.

The movie also has some fantastic performances. That being said none of them have the presence of Daniel Radcliffe so it falls kind of short. That's really the issue with the movie as a whole. It's beautifully shot and everybody is on board and giving it their best, but everything just fails to live up to the first movie. It's missing it's predecessors atmosphere and presence. It's living in the shadow of a better movie.

It's also lacking in it's tension and fright. Even the jump scares that you can't see coming fail to elicit a reaction when they occur. I may not have seen it coming (a rarity nowadays), but it still didn't scare me. There's little horror to speak of. At least not the kind that could scare anybody.

As a result we are left with a sequel that just feels dull when compared to the original. It would still be pretty darn dull without the first movie having taken place, but it's not hard to think that it might have been less so. It's a well put together horror movie. Just one that isn't as effective as the one that came before it. Even the woman in black herself seems to have lost her bite now that we know her story. She's become a rather dull specter who has little presence in her own movie.

5.