May the Devil Take You Too (Sebelum Iblis Menjemput: Ayat Dua)

 Not even two years after surviving a demonic ordeal that would wipe out their family, Alfie (Chelsea Islan) and Nara (Hadijah Shahab) are approached by a group of young orphans who suffered their own brush with another demon-summoning father figure.

 When I say approach, what I mean is that they break into their apartment with ski masks and kidnap them. The orphans are enthusiastic, but really, really not very bright in choosing a way to ask for  help; It makes for a high-energy home invasion scene, at least, and it keeps tensions high later when Alfie is understandably angry at these idiots, even after they apologize and explain their situation.

 Sadly, that's a running theme in this sequel to May the Devil Take You: It sacrifices sense and intelligence in an unholy pact to keep its energy high at all times. It's sporadically successful, but it makes for a pretty dumb movie.

 Other than that the basic setup is decent... if you can get over the whole abduction scenario. Sigh. Like the first movie, it starts off with very slightly more "subtle" scares (if you can call ghouls jumping straight at the camera or leering very visibly in the background subtle) as ghosts haunt Alfie and her new acquaintances. Then Alfie is tricked to read from a leatherbound journal that bears a striking similarity to the Necronomicon Ex Mortis from Evil Dead, allows the ghost of the orphans' father to come back from the dead... and the film starts putting the new cast through the wringer one by one.

Not sure why, but the specters in these movies look really happy to me.

 The orphans (Widika Sidmore, Baskara Mahendra, Lutesha, Karina Salim and Arya Vasco) are all thinly drawn types, so even after Alfie warms towards them a tiny bit their demises don't really register. The level of mayhem is kept up admirably, though, even when it's a cavalcade of concepts borrowed from other horror movies with a special place set, as always, for Evil Dead (besides the book, there's also a satanic basement with a familiar-looking trap door and several other direct lifts from Raimi's body of work; It's definitely upfront about its inspirations).

 All that said there's some fun to be had in seeing what writer/director Timo Tjahjanto does next and how he goes about it, and the movie as a whole is enjoyable as an unpretentious slice of low-budget nastiness. Its story is not as effective as the one for the first movie, but it goes about its grim business with similar aplomb and a sense of humour, and there's enough variety that it's never boring.

Because the register is always kept as high as possible, most of the acting is dialled up to eleven; there are a lot of screamed conversations in this movie, and some unfortunate overacting. I liked Chelsea Islan's work as Alfie in the first movie, but she's no Bruce Campbell (not a slam; only one person is), and her deranged emoting on a few key scenes here, while clearly modelled after Ash, doesn't work very well as the tone is closer to the original Evil Dead than to the more comedic sequels.

 The film does get a little more ambitious in its third act, though not in a particularly interesting way, and it's underserved by its budget (it attempts to use CGI to portray both fire and things crawling under the skin, both effects that remain notoriously elusive even to productions with much more money at their disposal). Still, it does take the series in a different direction; We'll see where the upcoming second sequel ends up, but I think I'm up for a Sebelum Iblis Menjemput: Ayat Tiga / May the Devil Take You Thrice where the victims get a little more agency.