Today's Review: The Woman in Black: Angel of Death

Finally wrote another review. Yes, it's been a while. More to come soon though!

The Woman in Black: Angel of Death - recensie

Not a very inspired sequel to an otherwise effective and stylish predecessor. It wasn't the actors, it wasn't the atmosphere, it wasn't even really the story that made it a rather boring watch devoid of real scares. It was simply the running out of gags, recycling the scare tactics applied in the first film, with nothing new to creep the bejeesus out of us added to the mix. That's usually the curse of these horror sequels: you know what shenanigans the evil portrayed in these films is up to and how it goes around attempting to frighten us, the spectators, while they are doing it. You can change settings, but not the nature and established tricks of the evil itself. Take Jason Voorhees for example: even transplanted to a spaceship in the distant future he was basically up to his same old bloody slashing routines. There's only so much you can do with your typical horror monsters, without inventing a new set of rules, which is often viewed (and not wholly incorrectly so) as a blatant cop-out, illogical in terms of narrative compared to the events of the previous film(s). There's simply not much more to a ticked-off ghost lady with a fetish for driving innocent children to suicide than the first film displayed and this second film regurgitated. Angel of Death certainly has proven the limits of the angry spectre's effectiveness to scare us. No need to prove it again with a third Woman in Black film, I'd say. But if this second movie makes money, that's very likely exactly what will happen.