Review of The Conjuring 2 (2016) by Sam H — 04 Nov 2017

I was fairly pleased with this bringing the two films together, despite that they really should have lead the franchise with a movie about the Warrens' investigation into the Amityville house and the exorcism that lead to Ed's relationship with the church to tie the series together better, instead of piecing it into this movie. Because it was clear in the first Conjuring that Lorraine was already having an issue with continuing to investigate. Instead it's going in a sporadic pattern - which is both confusing with the timelines for both The Conjuring and Annabelle, you can't exactly tell which reason it is that Lorraine didn't want to keep investigating. Was it the vision of Ed dying at Amityville, or did she see the same vision during the other exorcism or something else entirely? Which of them occurred first? Let's focus, Lorraine - shall we? "Did the chicken or the egg come first?".

How about the way those recorded tapes strategically landed and causes logic to suddenly hits Ed that the spirit of Bill has legitimately been skipping every other word? Was it really that hard to figure out? Also, what relevance does the demon Valak have to this storyline? Why is it following the Warrens? Where is that information at? They can spend all this time during the movie talking about music, giving Ed a vocal performance, and droning on and on about records but not establishing the main villain's role and reason in the film? Because as far as this movie shows - the demon's main purpose is to repetitively and incorrectly predict the future of Ed Warren by using other hauntings and spiritual activity to draw attention to itself. I suppose a good thing to draw from this is the jump building scares rather than a bunch of jump scares. Also, Ed and Lorraine's character development was nice to see a bit more of.