Damn it, A Haunted House franchise, I defended you. Yeah, you weren’t very funny and you were creepily homophobic and you were at least arguably misogynistic… where was I? Oh yeah, at least the first film in your deplorable franchise had a decent comedic conceit – the notion that moving in with your significant other forces you to confront their “demons,” illustrated through parodies of various haunted house movies – and one or two genuinely funny set pieces to reward us for sitting through the rest of it.
A Haunted House 2, on the other hand, is about as contemptible as filmmaking gets. It’s a string of loosely connected parody scenes with only one lazy punchline a piece, usually involving animal cruelty, the ineptitude of horror villains from other franchises and the confirmation of lots and lots of racist stereotypes. When Marlon Wayans approaches the Latino gentleman (Gabriel Iglesias) mowing his neighbor’s lawn, he assumes that the man is the gardener, not his neighbor. So the neighbor goes on a passionate tirade about the inherent racism of Wayans’ assumptions before finally admitting that yes, he does, in fact, also happen to be a gardener, and he’d be happy to mow Marlon Wayans lawn. He just happens to live next door. Ha?
It’s not a funny joke but at least it’s “a” joke, if only the first time you hear it. A Haunted House 2 goes on to repeat this exact same gag ad nauseum throughout its paltry 87-minute running time, transposed to different races and genders, interspersed with too-long montages of Marlon Wayans having kinky sex with the doll from The Conjuring (as if such a montage could possibly be too short), “hilariously” getting caught molesting his girlfriend’s teenaged daughter, and murdering a defenseless chicken for minutes on end. Meanwhile, “Mr. Boogie” from Sinister can’t seem to murder people right and the moths from the swiftly forgotten possession movie The Possession are swiftly dispatched with a bug zapper. Ha-ha?
There are a few gags in A Haunted House 2 that might actually be funny if they weren’t presented in the laziest way imaginable, setting them up for way too long and then calling far too much attention to the one supposedly “funny” part. But A Haunted House 2 feels too rushed, and too cheap, to bother with actual comedy. The whole film plays like the outline for a potentially funny spoof, with ideas for jokes spoken aloud instead of actually conveyed by the events of the scene. These shrill set pieces were then thrust into the inboxes of otherwise talented comedians who clearly weren’t given a chance to rehearse the material until it even sort of worked. As a result A Haunted House 2 consists entirely of easy punchlines practically begging for a reaction – shouting, and cruelty, and poo – and none of it is worth laughing at, or god forbid with.
The best that can be said for A Haunted House 2 is that the rampant homophobia appears to have been sidelined the second time around, although it has been replaced with a persistent confirmation of other unpleasant stereotypes. There may have been something worth exploring in that material, possibly by illustrating the way that political correctness can occasionally distract from honest cultural commentary, but instead A Haunted House 2 just wallows in the deepest mucks of the human condition, eventually emerging as a cruel, uninspired, ugly and – worst of all – painfully humorless comedy that speaks ill of everyone who made it and anyone in the audience who was too complacent to leave early and ask for their money back.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
