phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2020

Happy Death Day 2U



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2019
Runtime: 1h 40min
Country: USA, Japan
Language: English, French
Genre Tags: Comedy, Horror, Mystery
Plot Summary: Tree Gelbman discovers that dying over and over was surprisingly easier than the dangers that lie ahead.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: Leans harder into comedy than horror. The Back To The Future II of the original Happy Death Day, with a dose of Weird Science. As with the first movie, Jessica Rothe is a delight and sells every scene she is in.


Outside Reviews:

Tomris Laffly
1.5 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

If you can fend off the recurring bores of Happy Death Day 2U, Landon and Lobdell have some chuckles reserved up their sleeves. A sleekly edited montage of Tree's increasingly creative suicides (why get murdered when you can just kill yourself?) arrives just in time to alleviate the dullness, while an intriguing array of side characters - portraying nerds and villainous teachers - keeps things mildly bearable. The sequel doesn't drop the ball on some of the previous film's key roles either - in that, both the adulterous Dr. Gregory Butler and secretly malicious roomie Lori (Ruby Modine) receive character makeovers. Still, the uninventive Happy Death Day 2U can neither sustain nor recreate the charms of the first film by recycling its ideas. In a way, Landon's sequel gets stuck in its own alternate dimension—after starting off as something much closer to Scream in spirit, it devolves into a lazy Scary Movie.


A.A. Dowd
Grade: B- - Jessica Rothe makes dying and comedy look easy with the convoluted fun of Happy Death Day 2U

In many ways, this not-bad sequel feels more keyed to Rothe's expressive shtick. Landon barely seems to be trying for horror anymore—probably the right move, given how little suspense he seems capable of wringing from the hide-and-seek murder scenes, most of which take place in the same few hallways of a curiously empty and boringly nondescript hospital. (For all this series borrows from Wes Craven, it could stand to take better notes on his mastery of tension and release.) Not that the comedy is more sophisticated: The addition of a disapproving dean (Steve Zissis) and a supporting posse of lab geeks spikes the genre blend with a new dose of broad Revenge Of The Nerds tomfoolery, which is basically subtraction by addition. Nonetheless, Happy Death Day 2U at least knows what it has in Rothe, the scream queen as delightful screwball star. And if a baldly sentimental tearjerker subplot actually lands, it's because of the honest feeling the actor invests into Tree's new moral dilemma. Putting this premise through another iteration would almost certainly be overkill, but when did a slasher franchise quit while it was ahead? With Rothe on board, it wouldn’t be so bad, doing the time warp yet again.