Horror Movie Horrors: White Noise 2

Oh God.

Where do I even begin?


As you can imagine, I was not going into White Noise 2 expecting it to be a good movie. I remember seeing a booth promo'ing this straight-to-DVD thing back in 2006 at Comic-con. (Man, I need to get my ass back there. It's been too long.) Consider that it's taken me about 3 years to get around to watching it, despite having some very compelling reasons to be interested in it.

Okay, only one reason to be interested in it.

Fillion is good in it. I don't say that as a fan girl apologist. With what he is given, he gives a fairly believable performance. But this film has a horrible premise, followed by a terrible conclusion. It's not quite 'horribafuckus', but it's pretty damn close.

TMNT 3 was my favorite as a child. :(

In fact, many of the performances range from great to at least decent. The actors can't really take blame for the badness of this film. For example, Katee Sackhoff, while given very little to work with, is able to show her character as reasonable, strong and still vulnerable. Though she does suffer from the writers not knowing how to use her properly. For example, I know that it's a common trope to have women be incapable of fighting back while the men folk jump in to throw the punches but watching Starbuck flail about, smacking a guy repeatedly with her purse when he just tried to slit her throat is just ridiculous. Hell, watching any woman respond that way just seems silly.

It's like some weird Firefly/Battlestar Galactica crossover fan fic.

And that's the core problem to this film: the script. It is just simply poorly written. First off: this movie isn't about EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena). At all. It's a sequel to a movie about EVP. It advertises itself as a movie about EVP. Hell, it even has an awkward tie in trying to convince you that this is in fact a movie about EVP. It isn't. It's about near death experiences allowing someone to see when someone was about to die. That concept has nothing at all to do with EVP. This movie should have just embraced that fact and not tried to bend over backwards to make it fit into a franchise that it had nothing to do with. Not that it would have made it a good film. Just potentially better and less awkwardly written from the start. That, and they probably wouldn't have had as many TV-static themed jump scares.

"Bitch, I don't even need electronics. I'm just a spooky granny in an elevator - FEAR ME!"

The movie isn't scary in the least. It's a series of jump scares. Not only that - jump scares with no suspense to lead you into them. I've seen screamers with more skill in crafting their jump scares than this film. (I can still remember when I first encountered kikia... Dammit, Matt. You woke up my whole house with that one.)

A good jump scare (trust me, there are such rarities in existence) occur when the film builds suspense and then plays against the audience's expectations. They direct your attention to under the kid's bed. You know something is going to pop out and scare him as little Timmy leans down, slowly, oh so slowly, his breaths shallow and swift and his heart pounding in his ears. He lifts back the bed skirt and...

Nothing comes out from under the bed. The film plays against your expectation of something scary being under the bed, builds suspense, but doesn't deliver there. They deliver in the creepy jump scare that happens when Timmy decides he's safe and goes for a glass of water, but gets eaten by something in the hallway between his bedroom and the kitchen.

Poor little Timmy.

This film is also generally confused when it comes to back story. Let's break this down as if we were the ones constructing the plot. It has it's central plot device: Dude can see when people are going to die. Dude saves people from dying. Seems like the beginning of a super hero plot. But this is a horror movie. There has to be a negative consequence for it all, right? We can't just have a guy going about and saving people without something bad happening because of it, right? So, we make it so that he's disrupting their fates: these people were supposed to die anyway and in three days of them being saved, they die some horrible death that takes some other people out with them.

So why do they die in three days?

Answer: the Devil.

That's it, really. They try to tie it into this confused twist about how Christ rose on the third day, so the Devil kills people who were supposed to die on the third day... you know what, I'm not going to waste time trying to explain it. The movie certainly doesn't.

The Devil did it. Three days. Yadda yadda. Moving on.

White Noise 2 is a confused mess from beginning to end. Thank goodness I have much better things to watch Fillion and Sackhoff in. I'd imagine most of these actors (even the mediocre ones) are far too good for this movie.