10 years ago, I watched the first movie, and I was struck by the bleak, unflinching way Bertino dealt with violence. It wasn’t a fun movie like Friday the 13th or Saw, where the violence is spectacle. The original was somber.

This movie is…strange.

On the one hand, it makes sense to push the aesthetic to more of an 80s slasher vibe. The original evoked 70s exploitation, so a decade later, this one evokes 80s slashers–in all the ways you might expect.

I’m curious how the writing was changed between the original draft by Bertino and the subsequent draft. In some ways, this is almost the exact same movie as the first one, but with a higher body count. At times, the way the movie will hang on someone suffering for several minutes is very in line with the original, and it tries, at times, to recall the nihilistic themes of the first. (In fact, there is one plot point that I’m 90% sure was going to cpmpletely copy the first, but either got changed in reshoots or changed in a later draft.) But, in the last act, it pivots from basically the same as the first to deploying 80s slasher tropes so fast and heavy, it’s like they had a list and were checking boxes to fit them all in before the credits rolled.

This was more fun to me than the first, but that’s almost part of the problem. As a sequel to a movie that seemed to be making a point on how unpleasant and senseless violence is, this movie eventually revels in it, each plot twist upping the ante, stacking crazy on crazy until I was howling in the theater.

This one finishes like a rollercoaster. Not an original one, but a sort of fun one. However, it’s odd for a sequel, and seems to contradict it’s predecessor, and itself.