Happy Death Day 2U  ★★

AS you can tell from its naff title, the makers of Happy Death Day 2U think they’re pretty clever.

Despite being a disappointing hybrid of slasher and comedy, the original Happy Death Day made enough money in 2017 to warrant horror specialist studio Blumhouse greenlighting a sequel.

Writer/director Christopher Landon had delivered four of the successful Paranormal Activity series for the same company and now had another minor hit, so why not?

Granted I wasn’t the audience for Happy Death Day. I hoped it was going to be a fun mash-up of Halloween and Groundhog Day, but instead it delivered a dumb comedy with a few jump scares aimed at the teenage market.

The 2019 sequel ventures even further away from horror to become largely a teenage romantic comedy with science-fiction overtones.

In the first film Jessica Rothe delivered an engaging performance as student Tree Gelbman whose day keeps repeating in exactly the same circumstances, including her death at the hands of a knife-wielding psychopath.

It takes Jessica many days and nights of dying to finally work out how to reveal and stop the killer. That reveal wasn’t particularly interesting, but I did like that the film never bothered to explain what caused this time loop.

In contrast, and to its detriment, the sequel tries to do just that and winds up confusing and boring the audience with teenage hijinks centered around an experimental machine that can “slow down time at a molecular level” and create not only a loop but one that jumps between two characters.

Even trying to suspend your disbelief is a pointless exercise.

So what did I like? Not much. There was some humour in the frat girl characters and an interesting sequence involving a power station and the killer’s death was interesting, but that’s about it.

In contrast to the first film, Rothe’s performance is dragged down by the rest of the cast to unfortunately become more of an over-acting exercise.

****SPOILER ALERT****

Would anybody ever choose the death of their mother over the possibility of having a future relationship with somebody? I don’t think so. Plain dumb.