SPOILERS FOR A MOVIE STILL IN THEATERS

I WON’T SPOIL THE ENDING BUT I WILL DISCUSS ELEMENTS HINTED AT IN THE TRAILERS

Do I get my “horror movie fan” card revoked if I say that I didn’t hate this movie? As of writing this, Brahms: The Boy II sits at 10% on Rotten Tomatoes, tied with Fantasy Island (which I hated a lot). Granted, Rotten Tomatoes is not the best site to rely on, but still… I don’t think this movie was THAT bad.

Did you see 2016’s The Boy? It was a middle of the road horror movie about a creepy doll where the twist is that the doll isn’t haunted, instead there’s a crazy person living in the walls. This is the real Brahms and the explanation for all the strange things around the house that the protagonist had attributed to the doll. So it’s just a normal doll, yeah? Well… about that…

Here the doll is evil. Spoilers, I guess, but if you’ve seen the trailer it’s pretty obvious. They try to play it off early on as maybe all being in Ms. Katie Holmes’ head, but turns out there’s blatant supernatural evil afoot. Why is the doll evil? Unclear. How long has the doll been evil? For over a hundred years, inspiring children to murder over and over again. What was the name of the doll before Brahms got him, and why did the doll keep that name after Brahms was apparently killed between movies? That… is actually a good question. Despite having the same writer and director as the first one, this veers off in a much different direction and raises a whole bunch of new questions. Questions the movie doesn’t want to answer. Maybe they thought they’d get a third part.

And now for an aside. Last year someone on Twitter asked what people thought was the “okayest” movie of 2019. After a lot of internal debate I settled on It Chapter Two, but asking people at work I was shocked by the most common answer: “I don’t know, I only saw, like, 3 movies this year.” That was a good chunk of the motivation I had in picking up a theater subscription and aiming to see something on the big screen at least once a week, which in turn partly inspired me to create this blog! Anyway, despite 2020 only being two months in, so far I’d say that Brahms: The Boy II is a strong contender for my okayest movie of the year. It’s not great, it’s not awful, but it is definitely a movie I have seen.

Previous: The Boy

---

Follow Me Elsewhere

• WordPress
• Twitter
• Facebook