Happy Death Day 2U * (2019, Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, Phi Vu, Suraj Sharma, Sarah Yarkin, Rachel Matthews, Steve Zissis) – Movie Review

You can try to explain the New Killer, the Big Secret, and every other Big Twist in the 2019 horror thriller sequel Happy Death Day 2U, but you can’t. The elaborate plot simply makes no sense. 

It starts promisingly with Carter’s roommate, Ryan (Phi Vu) apparently reliving the same day over and over again as a mysterious paranoid killer with a single-toothed baby-faced mask and a big kitchen knife tries to murder him.

But then it swiftly abandons this idea, to bring on the feisty sorority sister, Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe), who is back to square one or film one, trapped in the same bloody time loop. Then, after so many deaths stopping Tree enjoying a happy birthday – unless she enjoys being killed of course – it turns out that the dimension-travelling machine Carter and Ryan are inventing might work, if the college Dean (Steve Zissis) doesn’t have it towed away, and get her into a sensible dimension, one in which there is no paranoid killer and her lover is Carter, and he is not the boyfriend of Danielle Bouseman (Rachel Matthews). Though this gives Tree an awkward little problem – in that dimension her beloved mom will be dead. So it’s either Carter or Mom!

Then, belatedly, she reveals she has a new problem. Every time she dies and wakes up, she’s gotten weaker. So just how many times can she die before her death is her last? Maybe her next death will be her last!

After about half an hour, it is easy just to give up trying to follow the intricate foolishness of the plot, apparently derived from Back to the Future Part II, in a homage of course. Carter and Ryan know all about Marty McFly and Doc, well they are boys, but Tree hasn’t heard of them of course. Script-writer (and director) Christopher Landon has though, and is happy to acknowledge the debt.

There is also a bit of a hint that he is borrowing from The Big Bang Theory with his scientific research character team of Carter and Ryan, Dre Morgan (Sarah Yarkin) and Samar Ghosh (Suraj Sharma), who seem just like younger versions of Leonard, Sheldon, Howard and Raj. Happy Death Day 2U is also indebted to Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream. It’s a dying breed of movies. Oh well, he is borrowing from some of the right kind of places.

After half an hour, Happy Death Day 2U settles down to being really bad and boring. It is pointless and silly, defying logic, suspense or tension. If the story fails to appear real, convincingly and credibly working in its own reality, there can be no suspense, no scares or no thrills. And that is how it is here. It is a fantasy ghost train Disney ride horror thriller in which the heroine is never in an kind of danger, except from having to speak the lines of the script or emote or run a bit.

As if realising this, Christopher Landon throws in some slapstick comic relief that would shame a Seventies Disney live action comedy. The stuff with the Dean and Danielle is, well, unsophisticated at best. Hint: comic relief is only a relied if it’s funny.

As a horror thriller, it is continually undercut by its comic relief, and is extremely mild and tame, with very little violence or gore, little strong language, sexual material and thematic elements. It has a PG-13 in the States, which is entirely suitable, and has an unnecessary 15 in the UK. Its target audience is 13 to 18.

There are a couple of things to learn from the movie, though. First, there are six dimensions. Second that if you fold up a brown envelope and poke a pencil through it, you can demonstrate to a horror movie heroine who can’t understand the film’s plot how she can be propelled in your science project machine into another of the six dimensions. Ah, that’s how it is done!

Did I mention the film’s low spot. With the heroine and her dead mother happily reunited in another dimension, ghastly re-bonding takes place, the mother spouting sentimental platitudes, and the soundtrack going all treakly. The duo are watching TV together on bed. The TV is screening Creature from the Black Lagoon. Absolutely everyone in the audience is wishing they were watching the Julie Adams classic. Talk about an own goal!

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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