So here we are and it’s somehow October once again. I’m not going to get too wistful but I am particularly fond of this time of year. The temperature starts to cool again and my favorite article of clothing comes off the closet shelf, the hoodie. It’s time for the pumpkin spice menagerie to re-emerge like a confident groundhog in February and take over every product it can get it’s grubby little paws on. But most importantly for the Cinemasters it’s time for a Spooktacular! And once again I’m diving into 31 days of horror movies. I jumped on this bandwagon last year with the trend being something I found many “Movie-Tok” folks undergoing. Being that many of them would simply offer recommendations or do a short video of the movie of the day and that not being my cup of tea, I took to our website to jot down my thoughts on each of the films I’d watch daily. Same rules apply as last year. I’m watching a different flick each day and the kicker is that they have to be classified as a “horror” movie by a governing body like a streaming service or respected website such as IMDb. They also have to be new to me. I think I might have one or two films on my list that I may have seen as a youth in part but didn’t finish or can’t remember. But I’m going to try to focus on totally new films to me. So now that we are caught up, lets dive in to my first endeavor to kick off the spooky season.
The Nun II picks up where the first movie left off, I’m pretty sure. I say that because honestly I don’t really remember a whole lot about the first film. It wasn’t good. Spoiler alert, this one isn’t either. Back in 2016 the “Wan-O-Verse” spit out a serious gem in The Conjuring 2. I was a big fan of this movie and it still holds up for me today. It might be my favorite in the series. I know many prefer the first installment but I’m a bigger fan of that first sequel. In it, the dynamic duo of Ed and Lorraine Warren go head to head with an evil entity known as “Valak”. It took the image of a spine-chilling nun whose eerie gaze was illuminated by two piercing yellow eyes. The visage this demon took was so compelling that a spinoff was in the works nearly as soon as The Conjuring 2 hit theaters. Like many fans of the film and of the expanding world James Wan and his people were creating, news of a stand alone movie based on the Nun was exciting. Then the movie came out. Not as exciting. Then a sequel was announced. Not as excited but still optimistic. Then it came out. I didn’t see it in theaters. But I have now watched it at home. And I can tell you that you might not need to watch it.
Now I’m not going to flat out tell you to skip it. If you liked the first one, you should probably enjoy this one more. So let me try and be optimistic first. The movie wasn’t ALL bad. I will say that there are a lot of really beautifully shot scenes with incredible imagery of the European countryside. I will also say that the addition of Storm Reid as Sister Debra was a welcomed bit of gumption that I sincerely enjoyed. So many horror movies follow these vague but also somehow simultaneously strict Catholic rules and a lot of the religious characters are woefully stiff. Her energy was a zestful boost of energy into a somewhat tepid cast throughout much of the film. I think the other thing I’ll probably list as somewhat of a positive is that there were many times in the film that they did a fairly decent job of building some real tension. One of my favorite devices I feel that has been cultivated rather adeptly in the modern horror scene comes out of the Wan universe and that is the quiet use of background space. The more subtle the better. I also happened to watch the final installment (hopefully) of the Insidious franchise the other night in gearing up for the 31 days and there were a number of times that the use of blurred or almost unnoticeable agents in the background of a scene compliment the growing tension in the film by allowing you to pay attention to what’s happening in front of you but also being dragged further in that something is amiss only to realize in an instant that there was, in fact, something there that has vanished. These tactics are some of my favorite to really make a scene more immersive. It’s like the inverse of a jump scare where instead of building momentum with screeching music towards an inevitable crash into something running down a corridor at you just to get your heart racing for a moment, you get a subtle nod to some movement over a character’s shoulder that just barely lets you know something is there that you and the protagonist were unaware of in the scene. It pulls you into the world as it’s being created and that immersion makes the creepiness factor go off the scale. That’s one of my favorite things about modern horror when it’s done right. And the do get it done properly a few times in this film. They still give way to many jump scares unfortunately which undercuts the overall effectiveness of the mechanism. But I’m trying to stay positive here, at least in this portion of the review.
Ok now that I’ve said the nice things I can really get into this movie. I’m not going to rip it apart but I am glad I only spent about $7 on the blu ray of this film for my collection. I’m sure it will get another watch somewhere down the road just for kicks. Maybe when my kids are in high school and they want to go through crappy horror movies with their friends they can bust the Nun movies out and revel in the pop up demons in all their cheap frights. Honestly as I watched the film I just kept feeling disappointed because I thought there really could be something to whatever was going on in the plot. There isn’t. The demon needs a Catholic McGuffin for some reason I don’t think I paid enough attention to know why. Most of the movie seemed like they were simply trying to find different and more clever ways of making it seem like the haunting image of the nun could pop up on somebody in a not-so-obvious fashion. Unfortunately many of them were pretty intentional. The set up with the flipping magazines on the lone illuminated magazine stand as Farmiga’s protagonist simply stood there for several minutes in manufactured terror waiting for the nun’s visage to take shape could have possibly been a moving scene but they burned it in the trailer. There was one really great one where the dilapidation of the building caused the paint to crack and fall in such a manner that as young Sophia was running down the stairs she was caught quite off guard by the shadowy image that it was quite jarring. It might be the one borderline jump scare I’d give them credit for in the film.
Coupled with the demon in the latter portion of the film was a goat man thing that reminded me of a furrier version of the black demon in the first Annabelle movie. It was there as a secondary twisted face meant to bring on more shock and terror. I liked that it was supposedly freed from the stain glass window in the old chapel. That part worked for me. Any time a person or a thing either comes out of or goes into a painting or in this case a window, that adds a real creep factor for me. The only problem was that this only really served as a vehicle to chase a bunch of school girls and their teacher around the grounds of the convent. At one point they wanted to really dial up the fright by having it’s evil eye peer intensely through a hole in the door but it was such a fleeting moment that it wasn’t long enough to add any real scare and it wasn’t jumpy enough to cause a reaction. So the whole thing felt disjointed. The whole movie had these two competing plot lines that were meant to intertwine going into the third act but it end up feeling more like they simply bumped into each other and kept going in their own directions. They overlapped just enough to keep the simultaneous stories going but they never really felt like they built into each other like it seemed as though they were supposed to.
So what does all this boil down to? Well I don’t like to pretend I’m some tough guy who just can’t get scared. That’s not the case at all. I sincerely did enjoy the point in the film when Sophia came screeching around the corner and was caught face to face with the shadowy image of the nun. It may have been my favorite use of fear in the whole film. I do feel like overall it was a little more engaging and had a story that felt slightly more cohesive than the first movie. That may be simply because this one is fresher in my mind. But what I do remember of the first one was it was hard to see much of the movie as it always felt dark and I don’t really know what the story was going for other than there was an evil nun lady that they were trying to get rid of in the end. But clearly they didn’t do a good job because she’s back in this one. And she needs an amulet or a necklace or something. It glowed, I know that. But I think they got her in the end so maybe this is where the nun is done. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. She got two whole movies. They’re not great but they’re there. That’s more than the Crooked Man from The Conjuring 2. He was supposed to get his own movie and that never happened. But here we sit with two separate movies about a freaky nun with some Scut Farkus eyes and messed up teeth. A lot of times I feel like I can go off my gut reaction when rating a movie like this. I think it’s a solid C-. A straight C feels a little too generous. It’s just slightly below the middle of the road. I don’t totally regret the watch but it also didn’t do much for me in the end either. It has it’s moments and if you’ve already sat through the first movie, you can sit through this one and probably enjoy yourself here and there. If you need a random modern horror movie and you just can’t think of anything else, this would probably do in a pinch. Having not really remembered much from the first one, you can get away with watching this one on it’s own, even though it does connect to the first. They give enough background that you’re not really lost. So that’s nice. All in all it was a pretty forgettable way to start off the 31 days of horror but they can’t all be winners. So that does it for the first installment. We’ll see you back here for day 2 real soon. Until then, I’ll catch you on the flip side.
