Review of The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (2014) by Stephen P — 18 Feb 2015

I was pleasantly surprised by the first Woman in Black film as utilised quite a few different scare tactics to create a really good horror film that stood out amongst the other horror junk coming out at the time. So going into this film I wanted to see more of what made the first one so great. But this film had other ideas, it just wanted to be another cliche piece of crap to add to the rapidly growing pile of crappy horror films. This movie failed to capture the tension that the first one provided so much of as this film always resorted back to.... yep.... you guessed it...... jump scares, the cheapest way to try to 'scare' you. Despite the jump scares, this film did have a few moments of creepy imagery that showed some potential, but the moments were continuously followed by a jump scare that removed any tension. There were even jump scares at times without any build up, someone is just looking out a window then BAM, a jump scare. A lot of them were very predictable and as a result made almost the entire film fairly predictable. The plot in this film was in one word just very very 'lazy', I felt like I could have written this movie better with no writing experience. It was filled with all the cliches you have seen countless times before and makes this film so dull and boring.

I must admit the last 10 minutes before the ending was I thought the most interesting bit of the plot as we get a bit of a location change but even the change of location wasn't enough to save us from the jump scares. I thought the lead actress did a pretty convincing job despite having to portray one of the most annoyingly stupid characters in a horror film. I am not at all familiar with the actress but she did a reasonably well job at conveying some emotion. Every other character was just very unlikable and you don't really get to know many of them so when something begins to happen to them you just don't care. Also one thing I noticed really let the film down was that it was at many times very very dark and hard to make out what was going on, that really took me out of the film and left me pretty annoyed. In the end this movie suffered from bad writing of characters and plot, bad lighting, and just bad horror, with a few redeeming qualities including an ok performance by the lead actress - 3.9/10.