October Horror Challenge 2019 #98: "The Invoking II"

Second verse, same as the first, only, hopefully better, not worse! That's right, I'm finally checking out the sequel to the low-budget horror movie "The Invoking." I gotta say, when I was typing this review, autocorrect tried to change that sentence to "low-end movie The Invoking," and that's mean, but kinda accurate. The first movie was a bunch of atmosphere that never gels into a coherent movie. I'm hoping this sequel is better (hey, don't look at me like that, sometimes sequels are better than the originals, it could happen!)

Apparently, this is a sequel in name only, which might be a good thing, considering how irritated I was by the original. This is supposed to be a collection of stories about people being touched (and often destroyed) by evil. It happens. It's not a regular anthology style horror movie, where we get a story that bookends all the short stories, like someone sitting down to read a collection of horror stories, and then each story is one of the short films in the movie. That helps ground those movies, but this movie just starts, and one story plays after the other with no connection between them and no indication of when we're switching from one story to another. That's kind of annoying. I mean, there's a little title card at the beginning of each new story, but I still wish they were connected somehow.

It might be a good thing that each of these stories is short, because my biggest problem with the original movie was that it dragged and dragged forever without ever getting to the point, and since they're short, these stories don't have time to do that. The first one is good, but a little too short to be called a "story." The others are cool, too. One has some good ghost effects, there's someone struggling with hallucinations that are a little too real, someone trying to run from justice (a bad idea in these kinds of movies), some friends goon a doomed cabin retreat (aren't all cabin retreats doomed in these movies), and a woman is stalked by a masked killer.

The stories are supposedly a collection of short films that producers found that weren't meant to be part of a collection. It's a cool idea, because short movies aren't likely to be released on their own, and if putting them together is more likely to get them seen, I'm all for that. This movie isn't anything original or groundbreaking, but the stories are still kinda cool, and I definitely liked this better than the first movie.