Coming to New Conclusions: DON JON

The title character in Don Jon is a big fan of his routine. An image conscious guy in his late twenties, he goes to the gym, to his bartending job, to the clubs, to church, to confession, to Sunday dinners with his family. He projects confidence and swagger that’s too good to be true. In fact, it is. He never really connects with another person, chasing women with his friends every night, but finding more enjoyment in seeing pictures of women online. They, after all, never ask anything of him. His approach to relationships is so simplistic and one-sided you know from frame one the movie is going to be about finding Jon a new, healthier way of approaching the world. That Jon is so confident in his delusions and superficial understandings of the way the world works makes him not pitiable, but somehow worth cheering for. I wanted him to improve and find true happiness. He’s just that charming.

Played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jon is a fun character to spend 90 minutes with as he slowly makes his way towards a better view of the world (and the women) around him. Gordon-Levitt also writes and directs, making Don Jon a one-man show of sorts. But instead of the movie becoming a tired case of a talented actor taking on too much in an attempt to create a vanity project, he has instead made a fairly generous movie that’s willing to throw attention to welcome supporting parts. He gave himself a fun part to play, but also provided his game cast of talented and sometimes underutilized performers nice little turns of their own. As his parents, Tony Danza and Glenne Headly commit to charmingly broad stereotypes of New Jersey Irish Americans, cooking up pasta and wondering when he’ll find a nice girl and settle down. His younger sister is played by Brie Larson in a largely silent performance that’s nonetheless full of personality. The scenes of the family together are full of charm.

Elsewhere, the plot’s main turns hinge on Jon’s relationships with women. The first is a supremely attractive good girl he meets while clubbing. She’s easily a 10, he tells his buddies as he sets out to play “the long game” to get her, sending her a Facebook message and inviting her to coffee. You know, starting slow. She’s played by Scarlett Johansson as a woman who is used to getting what she wants. And what she wants now is Jon, on her own terms and at her own pace. Even though she’s gorgeous and he’s over the moon to be dating her, he finds he can’t stay away from all those pretty girls whose images are only a click away. Rapid-fire montage of Pavlovian computer noises – the Apple startup tone becoming a call to action of sorts – takes us inside Jon’s addictive need for what’s on the other end of that googling.

Part character study, part romantic comedy, both slide sideways into an addiction/recovery dramedy that threatens to turn purely judgmental before pulling back into something a tad more reasonable. His addiction to pornography intersects with and eventually derails his perfect compartmentalized routines, forcing him to take a good look at his understanding of women and images thereof. It’s ultimately a kinder more compassionate film than you might initially think. The problem is not that he likes images of naked women; it’s that he’s lost all perspective about what those images mean. It’s not about perfecting a disciplined routine, but knowing when it’s healthiest to break from it. It’s not about objectification so much as it is about moving past initial appearances. It’s not that he’s a bad person. He simply needs to learn how to interact with actual women. To paraphrase actual dialogue, he needs to truly lose himself in another person and let that person get lost in him.

At a night class he meets a woman who helps him understand all of the above. She’s played by Julianne Moore in a decent performance that’s dedicated to enlivening a character who is purely a plot point personified. That’s too bad, and too convenient, but every character, from Don Jon on down exists here to be nothing more than vivid sketch characters of broad impact and light tone. It handles some strong material with a light hand, drawing swift cultural observation (note Jon’s perspective on rom-coms) with a wink and a grin. Gordon-Levitt’s writing and directing exhibits so much of the charm, confidence, and swagger of his character that the movie’s a largely enjoyable experience. It’s a charismatic debut feature, one that shows he’s certainly a promising talent on both sides of the camera. 

Talk it Out: ENOUGH SAID

If simply stated, the story of Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said could sound like a movie that would lend itself to flailing misunderstandings in service of an Idiot Plot. In it, a middle-aged woman finds herself with a new friend and a new boyfriend and then proceeds to get herself in a situation in which she can’t tell one that she knows the other and vice versa. Now she must juggle the two new relationships without letting the one spoil the other. It’s a quandary that could easily be played with broad implausibility, but instead becomes both understandable and funny through the precision of the writing and performances. Holofcener’s script is smartly written, perceptive in the way it teases out characters’ worries and preoccupations without going too big or too small. It’s a film that’s just right.

As a writer-director, Holofcener has an easy, comfortably verbal way of exploring emotional terrains that feel relatively normal. Potential for high drama remains subdued and situations seemingly primed for broad comedy never quite ignites with silliness. Most of her characters here and in films like her debut Walking and Talking (1996) and her wonderful Please Give (2010) would rather not experience feelings that’d knock them too far beyond even keel. They just want to be happy, feel good about their positions in life, and have good relationships with friends and family. These films present this struggle to either stay there or get there in ways that feel natural. In Enough Said, Holofcener positions her main character, a divorced middle-aged masseuse played winningly by the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in the middle of changes to her life. Taking a night off from dealing with an emotionally distant 18-year-old daughter (Tracey Fairaway) who is going away to college soon, she goes to a party where she meets both a nice guy (the late James Gandolfini) who will become her boyfriend and a new client (Catherine Keener) who will become her friend. She’s happy, at first.

The film develops into a light, modest movie about adults having adult problems that arrive more or less believably and are resolved in patient and relatively mature ways. That’s a treat. Holofcener pushes situations forward with bright, sunny cinematography and dialogue that crackles with unhurried natural wit that never feels overwritten. The film is breezy and delicate in the ways it allows the actors to let situations develop and punchlines land harder for not seeming to be punchlines in the first place. There’s fine observation in the comedy that’s airy without seeming superfluous. Louis-Dreyfuss has such ease on camera playing a woman who is relatively confident, but finds her relationships taking on complications she didn’t expect. Her scenes with Gandolfini are the highlight of the picture. His performance is terrific, tender and warm with understated heft. They have an extraordinarily unforced chemistry that’s prickly and flirtatious without seeming overtly giddy or extreme. They’re simply two divorced middle-aged professionals slowly growing fond of each other date after date. It feels so very grown up, and all the more romantic for not trying to be romantic.

Not quite a romantic comedy, the focus is instead on Louis-Dreyfuss as she navigates her many relationships. As her new friend, Keener projects a kindness and a neediness beneath her earthy poet persona that makes it easy to see why she wouldn’t be a friend one would feel eager to lose. It’s important for the balance of the plot that we not care more about a romance with Gandolfini than a friendship with Keener, and it’s to the actors’ and Holofcener’s credit that these characters each feel important in their own ways. Elsewhere, Louis-Dreyfuss has great scenes with old friends (a bristly married couple played by Toni Collette and Ben Falcone) and her daughter’s best friend (Tavi Gevinson). That relationship is especially fascinating, as this teen pulls closer to her friend’s mom even as the daughter pulls away. As an ensemble, the cast feels cohesive, never distracting from the major performance at the center, but adding nicely sketched minor notes of richness. It is with this richness that Holofcener creates a smart comedy that is light, satisfying and so intelligently performed and skillfully written that it doesn’t feel as light as it is.

Leftovers: CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2

A major asset of 2009’s zippy pleasure Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was its sense of surprise. It was an unexpected treat in the form of a zany hilarious contraption of imagination and heart. The bouncily, colorfully animated story of Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) and his food-generating invention (the FLDSMDFR) that goes very right, then very wrong, is a mile-a-minute joke machine running on slapstick, puns, and running gags of every kind imaginable. The premise was wacky – weather that rains food onto a goofy small town – and the breakneck pacing and deep down heartfelt characterization only helped elevate it into a glorious cartoony experience. Now, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 is not and maybe never could’ve been the total surprise delight of the original. But there’s almost enough diverting silliness here all the same. It is in many ways more conventional and subdued. To say it has half the laughs sounds like an insult until you remember the overwhelming number and variety of jokes that were packed into its predecessor.

Starting exactly eight minutes after the end of Cloudy, the sequel finds Flint and all the citizens of Swallow Falls awestruck by a famous inventor and C.E.O of multinational tech corporation Live Corp. helicoptering into their wrecked food-covered town. Chester V (Will Forte), as limber as he is rich, pays to relocate the townspeople while his crews of researchers clean up the island. Eagerly accepting the offer, the characters move on with their new lives. Six months later, though, clean up hasn’t made much progress because the FLDSMDFR somehow survived the first film and has generated an entire island ecosystem of mutant food. Meanwhile, Flint is having trouble getting promoted out of his entry level position at Chester’s company, so he jumps at his boss’s offer to travel back to island and find the rogue invention and shut down the jungle of “Foodimals” before they can reach the mainland and wreak chewy havoc.

Off Flint goes, with his dad (James Caan), meteorologist girlfriend (Anna Faris), and pet monkey (Neil Patrick Harris), as well as a cameraman (Benjamin Bratt), a chicken-loving bully-turned-friend (Andy Samberg), and the town’s policeman (Terry Crews). A sort of pun-heavy riff on Jurassic Park, the plot of Cloudy 2 finds our intrepid protagonists trudging through a jungle of fruits and veggies, running into all manner of monstrous (and cute) food creatures: smiling berries, grumpy pickles, elephantine melons, a gargantuan “taco-dile,” and hamburger spiders with French fry legs and poppy seed eyes. I especially liked a brief glimpse of a snake with a slice of pie for a head and a Twizzlers tail. Unlike its predecessor's joyfully overcooked disaster movie spoof, this is more of a light kiddie adventure with a dusting of smile-worthy winks to keep things lightly comedic. The characters are appealing and the visual design is delicious. It’s the screenplay cooked up by John Francis Daley, Jonathan M. Goldstein, and Erica Rivinoja (with story credits for Chris Miller and Phil Lord) that could’ve used more time in the oven.

Though even at its most obvious, there are elements that tickled me. The creatures are imaginatively designed and good for fun puns. I enjoyed the not-so-subtle dichotomy of organic goodness versus processed factory food evil that simmers underneath the proceedings. Live Corp is in the tradition of deceptively benign movie corporations that hide evil intentions in cavernous rooms populated by anonymous white lab coats busying themselves with unknown scientific tinkerings. I mean, Chester V’s assistant (Kristen Schaal) is an orangutan with a human brain implanted inside her own. He’s clearly up to no good, even without the most heavy-handed mustache-twirling foreshadowing in the opening scene. (Given the way the rest of the movie plays out, I wonder if that moment was put in specifically to defuse what would’ve otherwise been a little plot twist.)

But compared to the densely hilarious framing and sturdy script of its predecessor, Cloudy 2 feels thinner than it should. (Compared to, say, Turbo or Planes, however, it doesn’t look so bad.) The plotting plays out more or less exactly as you’d expect, with largely easy lessons that don’t really threaten to become anything too emotionally impactful. Pair that with the sparser joke population and the whole thing bakes into a flavorful concoction that could use a bigger does of sugar to get truly tasty. Still, there’s enough imagination in the creatures and silliness in the execution to make the time pass amiably enough. It is, after all, not every day you see a movie with a subplot in which a man teaches a bunch of pickles how to fish. 

Not Just Money: INEQUALITY FOR ALL

With the economy still struggling, it’s a shame that many are so fundamentally misinformed, content to coast on bumper sticker slogans and free floating generalized dissatisfaction, especially when many of those people happen to be stagnating in Congress or bloviating on 24-hour cable news. And so it is most welcome to find that Inequality for All, moderately snarky title aside, is about as warm, clear-eyed and accessible an economics documentary you could hope for. Its zippy, comprehensive approach outlines the economic history of the United States in brisk, smartly told ways, showing the factors that led to periods of growth and decline, elbowing past empty political rhetoric to get at the kinds of sensible, fact-based, empathic solutions that just might save us yet.

Our host is Robert Reich, professor, economist, author, and Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. He may be 4’11’’, but his presence in this film looms large. He’s the kind of guy who is impressively intelligent, a perception made all the more impressive for how lightly and humbly he wears his considerable smarts and how easily he makes complicated issues digestible for the masses. That’s not to say he dumbs down the material. Rather, he allows, with a relatable relaxed tone and an unexpectedly humorous tickle in his talking points, an audience to reach and grasp concepts that turn out to be not so intimidating at all. This is a film of facts and figures, charts and graphs, and heaping helpings of economic history, but it never once feels confounding. It also helps that it never feels misrepresented. Reich isn’t out to demonize individual political actors. He simply and patiently outlines the facts, lamenting political stubbornness and cynicism while promoting understanding and empathy as cornerstones of economic policy.

Through appealingly designed graphics – like a souped-up PowerPoint presentation – and cutaways to talking head interviews and human interest anecdotes, director Jacob Kornbluth surrounds Reich with the kind of shiny issue picture gloss that helps illuminate key points. Slick to a fault, and sometimes boring cinematically, this is never less than a fantastic edutainment package. It lays out the undeniable fact that in the last thirty years the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, and the gap between the two has grown staggeringly cavernous. Because this trend matches up so perfectly with Reich’s career as a prominent thinker on such matters, a framework of his biographical information provides a nice background layer, fleshing out what otherwise would have only been an incredibly charming host. Reich becomes not just a guy with the knowledge to impart, but a thoroughly humanized expert who makes for pleasant company.

Built around his “Wealth and Poverty” course at U.C. Berkeley, the film is a lecture in the best sense of the word. It’s conversational, welcoming, and professorial in a relatable, even entertaining, way. This could all have been so heavy handed, sad and pessimistic. But because Reich is both so knowledgeable and seems so upbeat in the face of a dreary economic present, the film takes on his charge of hopeful energy and erudite insight. Our country’s path towards a more equitable financial future is ready and waiting, he says. We simply need the political will and societal urging to get us moving in that direction. 

Captive Audience: PRISONERS

The tension in Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners slowly descends like a ton of bricks arriving methodically in the pit of your stomach. It’s nominally a thriller, but the thrill is more of a sick dread that creeps and lingers. Shots are still, the soundtrack is hushed, and the pace unhurried. When the central question the mystery turns upon is the whereabouts of two missing little girls, a sense of patience is the worst, ominous development. This film – eventually stretching out over two hours and thirty minutes of screen time – is not in a hurry. It makes you sit and wonder as the parents fret and mourn and the police go down the checklist, calling out searches, knocking on doors, chasing down the few leads they can scrounge up.

At the start, all is normal. We meet two families, friends and neighbors who are sharing a Thanksgiving meal. While the parents (Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello, Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) chat after dinner, their respective teens (Dylan Minnette and Zoe Soul) watch TV, and the two little girls (Erin Gerasimovich and Kyla Drew Simmons) play outside. Later, when they can’t be found, one of the teens notices that a camper parked outside a nearby house has vanished as well. It’s the only clue they have. A detective (Jake Gyllenhaal) is called in to start the investigation. Each day that passes, the chances of finding the girls at all, let alone alive, diminishes. The stakes couldn’t be any clearer, or more severe. The events are told clearly, with compact images that tell a story of crisply and quickly escalating tension.

What follows is a work of strong acting and filmmaking, ready to dig around in the darkness of its subject matter without a hint of prurient interest. It’s humorless, dour, and unrelentingly gray. Unlike the typical abduction-revenge template, the film does not devolve into mindless vigilantism and easy answers. In fact, it struggles with those questions, playing around in a darker, marginally more realistic register. Bello, Howard, and Davis are convincing in the details of feeling helpless and mournful, hoping against hope that the little girls will be found safe and alive. But they fall to the sideline somewhat as Jackman’s frustrated rage, clenched jaw and steely eyes, and Gyllenhaal’s anxious professionalism, complete with a blinking nervous tic, take center stage. This is no head-smashing revenge fantasy a la Taken no matter how many times Jackman shouts, “Where’s my daughter?” It’s icy and slow, full of frustrating dead ends.

The guy in the camper (Paul Dano) is caught and detained for questioning, but is let go when no evidence is found connecting him to the disappearance. Frustrated, Jackman howls at the police and roughs up the man, who looks and behaves odd enough that it’s hard for him to seem innocent, even if he is. The script by Aaron Guzikowski (Contraband) becomes an intricate web of clues and plot turns at times as cumbersome as it is satisfying in a grim, intensely felt procedural. The plot has all the pulpy makings of a revenge thriller, a missing-person mystery, but in the seriousness of intent and high quality shine of every aspect of the production, it avoids the easy pleasures of the genre, thwarting catharsis by sticking close to wounded performances of frustrated characters kept for long stretches without a clue. Prisoners becomes a title that takes on metaphoric weight for every character, every one a prisoner of duty, pride, mourning, circumstance.

Sequences of great dread find dim light pouring through dark doorways, flashlights illuminating crime scenes. There’s specificity and a spare hard-bitten beauty to the imagery that’s tactile. Master cinematographer Roger Deakins shoots crisp, chilly images that crackle with late autumn shivers. I could almost feel the dampness of an early December drizzle, smell the decaying leaves crusted over with a tentative layer of frost, sense the chill as a misting rain shifts into snow flurries. There’s a scene late in the film involving a car speeding through traffic during a late night rainstorm that sends stoplights, headlights, cop lights, and raindrops glowing and smearing in frames that are as tense and gorgeous as any I’ve seen on film this year. It’s a clear case of expert craftsmanship elevating a screenplay that in lesser hands could’ve fallen into flabbiness and silliness.

The story takes on more weight than it can handle. Coincidences pile up and by the end it’s nearly too much. It resolves all-too neatly, falling into Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters by the end. But it’s so well made in every other respect, it’s better than it is. It’s a movie that starts great and ends merely solid. The intensity and consistency of Villeneuve’s approach, the tough performances, and steady framing keep the story engaging and absorbing. I simply needed to see how the mystery resolved, even if by the end it was a matter of encroaching impatience mixing with genuine curiosity on my part. This is an overwhelmingly tense, deliberately paced thriller that’s ultimately a bit more familiar than the foreboding opening and morally muddy middle suggests. It’s not as good as it looks, but it’s more than good enough, judging by the gasps rolling through the theater at key twists, to hold an audience captive the entire time.

Music of the Heart: SING ME THE SONGS THAT SAY I LOVE YOU: A CONCERT FOR KATE MCGARRIGLE

Folk singer Kate McGarrigle died in 2010 at the age of 63, leaving behind a terrific body of work and a talented family of musicians. In 2011, in a New York City concert hall, a concert was performed in her honor. Singing her songs were her son and daughter, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, as well as her sister, Anna McGarrigle. Other guests included Emmylous Harris, Norah Jones, and, among many more, Jimmy Fallon, singing their hearts out in memory of the one who wrote the songs. The event was captured on film and put together by director Lian Lunson. The resulting concert documentary, Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle, isn't much of a movie, but it sure is a great concert. It's not often that I find myself wanting to turn off a movie's picture and just listen to the soundtrack instead.

The music, so tenderly written, so expressively performed, is transporting and enjoyable. It's all of a rather similar tone and cadence, a folksy wit and carefully strummed instrumentation calling out with clarity that the songs are from the same career, sprung from the same mind. I suppose the disclaimer here is that if it's not the kind of music you go for, it'll get repetitive fast. I happen to love this style of music, so I was willing to go with it. Several old favorites are trotted out. Her kids sing "First Born," with its charming lyrics about a first-born son: "That first born son is always the one / The first to be called and the last to come." Jimmy Fallon sings "Swimming Song" - "This summer I went swimming / This summer I nearly drowned" - which fits his persona well. Rufus, one of many singing "Prosperina," one of the last songs she ever wrote, has tears rolling down his face as they circle the haunting refrain "Come home to mama."

The songs are lovely and the mood is appropriately mournful. It seems like a good concert and a moving tribute to a mother, musician, and friend taken away by cancer. But as cinema it's uneven and clumsily packaged. The stage is shot simply for coverage in footage that switches between color and black and white arbitrarily. Context is largely absent, with sparsely commented upon home movies of Kate's younger years spliced into the concert footage. Lunson is in the same instance doing too much and not enough to material that's inherently powerful and entertaining. Either give us the events plain and simple unadorned or give us the full biographical context. Stuck hesitantly between, the movie feels overlong and unsure of its purpose.

That said, the star of the show is Kate McGarrigle's music, strong and powerful, and the friends and family breathing new life into her words and melodies. There's not much need to see the movie, but it's sure worth hearing. Available now on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, XBox, Playstation, Google Play, Youtube, and SundanceNow, it'd be worth renting a stream just to listen. I'd recommend the soundtrack album over that, but on the chance you want to see the concert, the movie's your only option. Besides, with just the sound you'd miss the emotion on the faces of the singers, smiling through tears, keeping their mother's, sister's, friend's music alive. There's a devastating anecdote snuck in at the last minute in which Rufus and Martha tell of their mother's final moments alive, surrounded by family, playing an old recording of her children as children singing a Christmas carol she had taught them. She died as she lived, with love and song.

Things Still Going Bump in the Night: INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2

A group of paranormal investigators have broken into the long abandoned home of a deceased serial killer. One of them slowly approaches a dusty chest latched shut in a creaky corner, arms outstretched to open the mysterious storage unit. That’s when a lady in the audience shouted, “That’s probably not a good idea!” That made me laugh, mostly because of her qualifying the statement with a “probably.” It’s most definitely a bad idea to do anything in the long abandoned home of a deceased serial killer, especially if you’re in a horror movie, most especially if you’re in a horror movie as dutifully predictable as Insidious: Chapter 2. It’s the kind of movie that, when a flutter of white fabric flits through a doorway deep in the background and Barbara Hershey nervously calls out “Renai?” you can be completely and totally sure that that’s not Renai at the end of the hall.

James Wan directs from collaborator Leigh Whannell’s screenplay, using the jumbled, thoroughly extraneous sequel to their original film as nothing more than an excuse to show us some of the inventory in his bag of horror filmmaking tricks. To be sure, Wan did that with their creepy Insidious in 2011 as well as his even scarier The Conjuring this summer. In Insidious: Chapter 2, however, we have nothing more than a rehashing and recapitulation of the previous film in ways that are theoretically interesting, but are in practice rather hollow. All the tricks in the world couldn’t have saved this movie that’s only interested in picking up where the story left off, finding ways to repeat what came before, echoing or outright restaging from different perspectives all the best scares from the first film on its way to a similar conclusion.  

As the pre-credit jump scare at the end of Insidious implied, after rescuing one of their sons (Ty Simpkins) from the clutches of an evil ghost in a shadowy spirit world, Renai (Rose Byrne) suspects her husband Josh (Patrick Wilson) returned with a possessive evil clinging to him. Chapter 2 picks up shortly thereafter, as Josh tries to convince his wife that moving into his childhood home with his mother (Hershey) will help them move on. She’s not buying it, especially as ghosts appear frequently in ways she recognizes from the first time. It feels like what the second half of a far-too-overlong version of the original film would’ve entailed. If the first was in some ways a riff on Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, this is most definitely a Poltergeist II: The Other Side. Sequels mean never having to say it’ll never happen again. Here, it all happens again.

There are mysterious noises, startling apparitions, slamming doors, bleats of punctuating orchestration, portentous dreams, a return of the bumbling tech-head ghost hunters (Whannell and Angus Sampson), and loud, sudden ghostly activity. It’s all so very familiar, sometimes reusing footage of the first film in moderately clever ways. But it proceeds with a sadly draining sense of repetition. In the first film, scary things happen to frightened people. This time, frightened people happen to scary things, a small but important shift. Since the hauntings have followed the characters from the first time, they have more agency and information. Rather than using that to catch on more quickly to what’s happening and use the knowledge of the first film in sharp ways, the plot requires the main characters to blindly stumble into similar troubles while side characters set off on an investigation into a spooky boarded-up hospital and an eerie abandoned house. I suppose I don’t mind that on principle, but did they have to go in at night armed only with low-wattage flashlights and a set of woo woo spirit-communication dice? It’s like they knew that’d be the creepiest way to go about it.

After getting his first big break with the inventive, but icky for icky’s sake, 2004 feature Saw, Wan has slowly but surely become a confident horror director. He plays on fears by foregrounding what’s inside and outside of the frame, moving the camera in sometimes-masterful ways to reveal scares and withhold jolts until the tension of not getting a shock is almost unbearable. But here he’s putting his talents to use with awfully thin material, cheaply repetitive and recycled, not just from its own predecessor, but from a whole host of horror tropes. The whole thing is shivery, but never truly scary, with jump scares that can’t even make it to the level of a jolt. In its entirety, it is less frightening than any given five minute stretch of The Conjuring. It’s the kind of stale regurgitation that gives horror sequels a bad name.