A Haunted House 2 (2014)

1 Star (out of 4)

Ghost Bust

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Whereas A Haunted House made a cursory attempt to get away from the pure spoofing of the Scary Movie series and concentrate more on characters, A Haunted House 2 simply abandons this idea. Instead we're back to constant sex jokes, jokes about bodily functions and excrement, backwards jokes about race, and a few other more tasteless jokes. The movie attempts to spoof recent hits The Conjuring, Insidious, Paranormal Activity 4, The Possession, and Sinister, but mainly just copies certain scenes and adds in big, dumb doses of slapstick.

Following the events of A Haunted House, Malcolm (Marlon Wayans) leaves his possessed girlfriend Kisha, presuming her dead after a car crash. A year later he moves in with his new girlfriend, Megan (Jaime Pressly) and her two kids. Her teen daughter becomes obsessed with a old box found in the basement, while the younger boy begins talking to an imaginary friend. A creepy doll begins to occupy Malcolm's thoughts, as well as a box of old films upstairs, revealing a demon trying to kill the house's previous occupants. A demon is on the loose again, it seems, and so ghost hunters Noreen (Missi Pyle) and Ned (Hayes MacArthur), as well as Father Williams (Cedric the Entertainer) are called in. Will Malcolm make it to another sequel?

The last movie acknowledged the relationship between the couple as they learned to live together, and then Cedric the Entertainer came in and juiced up the third act with some improvised lines. Now Malcolm has quickly jumped into a new relationship, which is not explored (except to make several "interracial" references), and Cedric's new scenes are far less fresh and not very funny. Mostly, the movie is seriously dumb and just a little depressing.