Unoriginal, yet scary

Rating: 7/10 (25 June 2016)

First of all, this was a surprisingly strong sequel. As a fan of the first movie, I've been looking forward to this for quite some time. I watch a lot of horror movies and it always really bugs me how the setting is similar in all of them: family moves into house, house is haunted, paranormal researchers arrive and save the day. This film was no different and didn't stick out as very creative either but it was still pretty enjoyable. You can usually expect a solid horror movie when you watch something by James Wan. The film has a few good, however predictable scares. It's not subtle horror either, but the jumping-in-your-face kind. I don't really get why this has been rated 10/10 so many times as it is definitely not flawless. Another thing about this movie was its duration. Horror films are usually around 1h 30m, except this one was over 2 hours which I found a bit too long. For example, was that scene of Ed singing "Can't help falling in love" really necessary? In my opinion, you kind of start to lose interest after an hour because there is just that about 20 minutes long part where nothing really happens. To summarize this, I was pleasantly surprised by how well the sequel held up to the first one, however I think that it is still just an average horror movie.