SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
This is the continuation of the story of a family in which a certain sort of magical power resides. The father and son can see, and be seen by, the world of the dead. Something like that. Anyhoo, in the first movie some stuff happened, and now in this movie, the father has been possessed by an evil old lady who's actually a dude. So the father's soul is actually wandering the world of the dead wanting to get out, while his body is running around the real world being evil, and his son is continuing to connect to all this and be freaked out, and a team of wacky comic-relief ghostbusters run around and bungle things up. Ghostly child abuse ensues.
Honestly, this movie was pretty hard to follow, in part because the wife of the family, and someone who I believe is her mother, were too hard to tell apart. That's probably insulting to the daughter, but hey, let's say I'm being flattering to the mother! It's also confusing in other ways, it kind of jumps around. Anyway, like the first Insidious movie, this one isn't really scary... it has a scene or two that can creep you out, but mostly it's just telling a story. Just like the first movie, it's a fantasy story by my calculation rather than a horror story. I can't quite define what the difference is, but that's how it feels to me. I did enjoy the sort of 'time travel' between the two movies (more between the end and beginning of this movie, but there's a bit of it tied to the first movie).
One thing I did not enjoy was the climactic battle with the evil ghost... the image of all the women standing underneath sheets was creepy, but it all came down to this cartoonish pop-up screaming old lady, and smacking her on the head with a rocking horse. Yes, that's literally how the evil ghost was slain. They smacked her with a rocking horse. Spoilers.
So in the end, there's a body count of 17, I think, and I rate this a passable
3 out of 5 Rocking Horses.
For this movie, I drew the set of 'spirit dice' that the medium guy uses to talk to ghosts. It seems the spirits have a special Hamumu message for us...
