V/H/S 2 and The Last Exorcism 2

First off, a belated happy Fourth of July to you all! I hope you got to see some good fireworks. In my area it rained all week, so I didn't get much of fireworks this year.

Today I'm going to talk about a couple of horror movies I saw recently. Both are sequels to movies I rather liked, V/H/S and The Last Exorcism. Both of these movies were handcam movies, which I enjoy. V/H/S was an anthology movie with a pretty unique premise, at least in my experience. It centered around a group of guys who were payed to break into a house and steal a VHS tape. When they break in they find the house's owner dead and piles of tapes all over. The stuff on the tapes make up each segment of the movie. It wasn't a perfect film, but I enjoyed it. V/H/S 2 didn't let me down. The story in this one follows a PI hired by the mother of one of the guys from the first film to find her missing son. They go to his house and find a pile of VHS tapes. Just like before, those give us our segments. I'm not going to go into details about the segments, but most of them are pretty cool. Both films give you a nice mix of styles, with each segment being written and directed by different people. If I had to choose, I'd say the first one was slightly better overall, but the sequel has the best segment. A handcam story about alien abduction? I've been waiting for one of those for years, ever since I saw Incident in Lake County back in the day! A bigger budget version of that could be the most terrifying film ever made. The short in V/H/S 2 comes close to it, but it's just a short. Anyway, if you're looking for some good horror flicks, the V/H/S movies are pretty cool.

Now for The Last Exorcism 2. The first movie was another handcam flick, about a preacher who performs exorcisms, but doesn't really believe. In the movie, he's filming a documentary about what will be his last exorcism, hence the title. Of course, this one just happens to involve an actual demon. I'm not going to go into specifics, I can't without spoiling it, but it was a good movie with a cool ending. Horror movies, especially in recent years, have crap endings far too often. This was the problem with The Last Exorcism 2. The sequel follows the story of the possessed girl from the first movie as she attempts to get on with her life. The sequel is not a handcam film like the original, just a traditional movie. That's fine, I don't need all my horror films to be handcam. My problem is that it features some inconsistencies from the original, plus has a really, really stupid ending. So while I would highly recommend the original, I can't do the same for the sequel. It's not terrible, just not very good. Definitely a disappointment to me.

As always, thanks for reading! If you want to recommend me some good horror movies, leave a comment below. You can also follow me on Twitter @RevLink_GI.