Knock Knock 2 (2011) (USA)

aka Haunting at 1666/1666

⭐️1/2

No, it has nothing at all to do with the wretched New York slasher flick from 2007. So, that’s good. Unfortunately, whereas that outing shit the bed of the subgenre that gained popularity in the wake of Carpenter’s Halloween, this outing shits the bed in the subgenre that gained popularity in the wake of The Blair Witch Project. See kids, in the end, nobody wins! A quartet of twenty-somethings spend their All Hallows Eve knocking around supposedly haunted locations in Los Angeles. This brings them to an infamous house, the original title’s 1666, and to a fate that has remained a mystery until a year later when their footage was found. Our hero Aiden is the kind of dip who records everything and his girlfriend (fiancée after the first few minutes) is the kind of dip that puts up with his really annoying personality. Their friends aren’t much better and all together they act like idiots about a decade younger than their IDs would claim. An uninteresting and ill-prepared ghost tour (points for keeping it real) makes up the first act while the quartet talk over each other or read Wikipedia information about the spots they’re checking out. After a stretch of failed spooky sightseeing, the gang finally gets access to a haunted location (they break in) and something is there waiting for them in the abandoned house. At least it’s the ladies who instigate the stupidity and the guys are all cowardly about it… eat it, stereotypes! Young white dudes have been portrayed realistically stupid in horror films for far too long! A freak breeze gets everyone stuck in the house and looking for another door out and then frustration births the expected arguing. No cell service and no exit sets them up to meet their maker via supernatural tomfoolery… it doesn’t happen soon enough. Crying babies, digital interference, boarded windows, failing friendships, hollow heroics and sparingly used ass-standard apparitions stand in as the thrills. It at least seems to be trying a littler harder than the original Knock Knock although that name got attached to this bad boy after the fact… I assume because this doesn’t even make a passing mention to the events of the New York slasher flick and if it does, I may have dozed off during that portion of the movie. They also do that really annoying found footage thing where the “real” footage has spooky music added to it, I just feel like that’s a way the filmmakers let the audience know they do not trust their own material.