Scary and Entertaining

Rating: 8/10 (11 June 2016)

I am a big fan of 'The Conjuring' and I think it's the best horror movie of this decade so far. The expectations were high for the sequel with James Wan returning, but I also knew that the track record for horror sequels in general is not very good. As a horror movie, I think 'The Conjuring 2' succeeded at being entertaining and scary.
The camera-work from James Wan is as good as it was in the first entry. The build up to the scary scenes is well-made and I love his establishing shots of the house. Something as banal as a chair can become scary in this movie. To me the best part of this movie was clearly James Wan's direction.
In fact, there's a lot of good in this movie, but I was not a fan of the script. I know it's not necessarily fair to compare it to the first one, but we didn't get the big 'Annabelle' or the basement scares that we had in the first one. I also felt like the demon was not very threatening.
To me the first 30-45 minutes were really scary and entertaining, at some point I was telling myself "Well, this is almost on par with the first one', but things got a little bit out of hands in the last act. Without giving up spoilers, at some point in the film there's a new ghost entity that reveal itself. When you'll see the movie you will understand what I'm talking about. It took me a little bit out of the story, especially since they kept telling us it's based on a true story. But it was a cool ghost nevertheless.
All things together, there are some great performances (I liked the little girl playing Janet) and spooky filmmaking by James Wan. It's not very fair to compare this with the first Conjuring, but if we compare it with other horror movies coming out these days, "The Conjuring 2" prove itself to be a worthy sequel.
8/10