I recalled my experience of the original Haunted House film at the beginning of the year by saying in my review, "When I sit through an eighty-one minute parody, given nothing but extended fart gags, annoying characters, ridiculously crass sex scenes, and a minute and a half sequence of a grown man having sex with a teddy bear, I don't laugh, I wince and later recall the experience sourly." Despite most of my review of the original film applying to the film's sequel, A Haunted House 2, I specifically cherrypicked this quote because it was a list of the glaring annoyances in the original film. However, I don't have to do much modifying to that sentence to describe the miscalculation that is A Haunted House 2 except in this film, a grown men has sex with a cursed doll rather than a teddy bear. Indeed, we must endure a horribly long, crass, and desperately unfunny scene of Marlon Wayans having explicit and lewd sex with a doll before his wife comes in. At first, it seemed like a horribly desperate way to achieve laughs; now it seems like a pleasurable act for Wayans to engage in one of his presumed fetishes. Have mercy.
A Haunted House 2 compliments its predecessor in that it's a moronic assembly of ridiculous scenarios, unfunny parodies, and lazily-written scenes, strung together in a style that resembles a collection of vignettes rather than a real film. We're reunited with Malcolm Johnson (Marlon Wayans), who attempts to move on from his old girlfriend Kisha and move in with his new girlfriend Megan (Jaime Pressly) and their two kids. Megan's teenage daughter winds up discovering a box in the basement of their new home, which she proceeds to carry around and coddle obsessively, while Megan's younger son exercises his imagination with an imaginary friend, who turns out to be vulgar and abusive. Malcolm also discovers a doll, which spoofs the Annabelle doll from The Conjuring, which seems to hold cursed powers and clings to a strange, sexual relationship after Malcolm winds up having sex with it one night. The film basically follows the blueprint of its predecessor, which is just to be just as repetitive as the Paranormal Activity films we've been greeted with this year in a haphazardly-handled manner.
The irony of A Haunted House and its sequel is that if Marlon and company wanted to prove they were funnier or somewhat superior (which is kind of what the idea of a parody film is, poking fun at the clichés in a manner that provides the illusion of a higher-power of wit and creativity) that they'd create a film that was more bent on satire rather than catering to the lowest common denominator of American audiences. Similar to Grown Ups 2, no matter how hard you try, the film seems to have a lower impression of you than you have of it, and provides eighty-two minutes of some of the most contrived, predictable entertainment we've seen all year.
A reminder to readers not wholly familiar to my work - I enjoy the raunchiest of comedies, the lewdest of scenarios, and frequently regard films bearing foul language and nudity as enticing works of modern comedic art. However, A Haunted House 2 demonstrates nothing more than forced humor and crassness taken to the level of pure laziness and monotony. Despite all efforts to infuse jokes and references into the film's structure, writers Wayans and Rick Alvarez, along with director Michael Tiddes, make the crucial and crippling mistake of acknowledging the franchise or name they want to parody and assume we should laugh based on recognition, which is a fatal misstep for this genre of films, pioneered by the equally-lazy and contemptible likes of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (the men behind the "Movie" franchise of parody movies, like Date Movie and Epic Movie).
The only true reason to endure the dreadfully unfunny spectacle of tastelessness that is A Haunted House 2 is to see the comedic energy of Wayans himself who, while making a very bad film, still manages to be spirited and zippy about the whole affair, along with Gabriel Iglesias, whose brief scenes in the film provide for some necessary comic relief. Even if such scenes are predicated off of tiresome stereotypes and misrepresented exchanges of racism, at least it beats overlong scenes of filthy, unnecessary sex inside a film that's already nearly unwatchable without them.
Starring: Marlon Wayans, Jaime Pressly, Gabriel Iglesias, Affion Crockett, Essence Atkins, and Cedric the Entertainer. Directed by: Michael Tiddes.
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