Brahms - The Boy II

In Brahms Way

Brahms - The Boy II
2020 USA Directed by William Brent Bell
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Okay, this one has spoilers.

When I was watching pre-movie trailers at the cinema a few weeks ago, one came on and, after a little while of my brain not really believing what it was seeing, I nearly got out of my seat and shouted in exasperation... but in the end just muttered loudly to myself... about somebody actually making a sequel to one of the absolutely worst horror movies of the last few years, The Boy (reviewed here). In fact, that first one wasn’t even technically a horror movie because the promising set up of a haunted doll that wants you to obey all its rules suffered a terrible plot twist where it turned out to be a serial killer looney living in the secret crawlspace of the house and moving the doll around when nobody was looking. It was a huge disappointment and made for a terrible cinema experience.

So I was hugely curious as to a) how anybody could make an effective sequel to what was essentially a one trick pony when it comes to the ‘big twist’ but also b) why in heck would anybody want to make a sequel to it. Since I own a Cineworld card it would cost me nothing extra to find out and I was kinda gleefully expecting the worst. Especially since the one element which made the first movie worth seeing, a new score by Bear McCreary, was absent in this one. I’ll say a word about the score to this one a little later. 

So Brahms - The Boy II has no characters left over from the first film other than the titular doll itself and, instead, deals with a family who move to a smaller house on the same grounds as the mansion in England where the events of the first film took place, after the mother (played by Katie Holmes) and son (played by Christopher Convery) have been traumatised and nearly killed by a violent burglary attempt in their own home. The boy is left effectively mute by this experience but, soon after moving there, he finds the buried Brahms doll and it begins to dominate his actions and take over his mind.

That’s the basic set-up and, it has to be said that, although the jump scares and sinister atmosphere from the first three quarters of the first film are largely absent in this one, I’d have to say that this one is marginally better than the first. Not to say that this is an especially good film... it’s not... but it is better than the first and one of the things this one does get right is... like the recent Star Wars movie... to redact or rewrite the denouement of the previous film and have it so that the reason the guy was running around in the crawlspace killing people was because Brahms was making him. And, for sure, in this movie there’s no getting around that the doll in question is a lot more active than in the original. He regularly moves his eyes and head and, when you’re not looking, runs about the place causing mischief. This, of course, puts this movie right back into the genre of horror which the first film managed to throw out with it’s awful ‘reveal’.

Of course, once that cat is firmly out of the bag, the whole film becomes a lot more predictable too, especially in terms of one of the other characters and their dog. Not to mention a heck of a lot more ridiculous by the end when we find that Brahms can levitate people too and do all kinds of things he wasn’t doing in the first one. We also see what’s ‘behind the mask’, so to speak and the little zombiefied homunculus living inside the doll is certainly a lot more interesting, if ultimately a little bit more schlocky, than the anything found in the original movie. Alas, although the film is by the same director, this one is just not scary in the way it does things and the epilogue at the end of the movie, where we are given a glimpse into where a possible sequel might go... well lets just say that a sequel to this movie is the last thing we may want.

There are some nice things about it too... the shot design makes use of various spaces partitioned off into clearly defined rectangular frames and there’s a nice moment where the foreground arch in the interior of a house, from where the camera is shooting the movie with the action taking place in the next room, is mirrored by a smaller arch, in terms of perspective, behind the actors... which is a neat touch.

Also, that score on this one by a guy called Brett Detar is actually quite good... probably the best thing about the movie, actually. A shame, then, that Lakeshore Records, in their lack of good judgement, have decided not to issue the score on CD but instead just go for an electronic download. So I guess I won’t get to hear it as a proper stand alone listen now. I would have happily plunked down £15 - £20 on a shiny disc of uncompressed music but, as they say on a certain soundtrack message board, ‘no CD, no sale’.

And that’s me done with Brahms - The Boy II... not a film I’d especially go out of my way to recommend to anyone but not nearly as bad as the first film at any rate. I really hope they don’t try and make anymore sequels to this one though... I don’t think I could handle the disappointment.

The Boy

Brahms, La La Boy

The Boy
2015 USA/China/Canada
Directed by William Brent Bell
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very mild spoilers.

Well this is a bit of a shame. I was all up for a creepy, haunted doll movie after the 2014 film Annabelle (reviewed here) turned out to be such a disappointment in this sub-genre... especially after it was a spin off of one of the greatest modern horror movies ever made, The Conjuring (reviewed here). The trailer to this one looked deranged enough and had some nicely atmospheric moments which compelled me to take a look at the cinema, even if just to find out if either of the endings to the movie I had in my head, due to the way the trailer was edited, were the correct solution to the on screen mystery.

So off I went and I would normally, at this point, be very happy to say that The Boy completely went in a different direction and took me by surprise... if it wasn’t for the fact that the direction it does go in is such a mis-step that it completely destroys the atmosphere of suspense and lurking dread that the rest of the film had been working so hard and successfully to achieve. And it’s a pity because, frankly, right up until the last twenty minutes or so of the film, the audience I saw it with were completely going with it.

If you’ve not seen  the trailer, the plot of The Boy is about a woman called Greta, played by Lauren Cohan, who has come to England to escape an abusive ex-boyfriend, taking on a job as a babysitter/nanny for a while at an old mansion sized house. However, when the parents, who are about to go off on holiday, introduce her to the young ‘un in question, who is called Brahms, they introduce her to a doll. The parents act and talk around the doll as if it’s alive, somehow embodying the spirit of their eight year old boy who died in a fire and they have a list of duties which they expect Greta to follow while she is left ‘holding the baby’, so to speak. Greta thinks the two of them are fruit loops already but it’s easy money and suits her needs to be out of the USA while her ex pursues her by force, so she’s happy to take the money and go through the motions.

However, when she is left alone, it becomes clear that something else is going on with The Boy and the supernatural seems to come into play. Kinda. Perhaps. Oh, look... although this film uses the visual syntax and grammar of a horror movie, it really doesn’t roam into that territory as far as I’m concerned. Sure, it uses jump scares and dream imagery to shock the audience at some points and the audience I was with, in particular, were really jumping at some of the quite obvious moments where this kind of cheap effect takes place... but as far as I’m concerned the film belongs in a completely different genre and not the one seemingly presented here, to be honest.

That being said, the performances are mostly pretty good with the main protagonist Lauren Cohan being ably matched by ‘the delivery boy’ Malcolm, played by Rupert Evans. I found the acting by Brahms himself to be a little bit wooden but, you know, I guess that’s to be expected. The acting is nicely supported by some roving camera work which does all the usual horror clichés too, diverting attention to edges and corners of screen so the audience can keep worrying about where the next fright is going to be coming from.

The big problem here, though, is the last 20 minutes of the movie. The writers/director decide to take the solution of having what has been going on in the film up until now as being some kind of red herring to set up with a twist but... it’s a really awful one and completely downgrades the movie, I reckon. And it was such a promising set-up too. However, I know I’m not the only one who thought so because, although the audience had been acting really jumpy and scared throughout the course of the movie, here they started to realise the over-the-top ridiculousness of the situation and began to openly laugh at the chase/histrionics at the tail end of the movie. It’s a real shame and, not only was it a lame solution to lumber the movie with, it also stands in a somewhat contradictory manner to the way some of the POV shots in the film were taken. I don’t want to say too much about that on here but certain technical details of those kinds of shots seemed somewhat at odds with the film’s final solution and it appears, in some ways, to make a nonsense of the rest of the film proceeding it.

Now, I heard the movie had a slightly troubled production and post-production, specifically on the latter in scenes which were cut from the movie in order to gain a softer, more money friendly rating. Now, for whatever reason those sequences were cut, one possibility I have to consider is that maybe there was footage missing from the final print that explained a few of the contradictions in the story/genre type as I found them... so it may not have been the fault of the director if certain elements of the story don’t jell as well as they could have. Even so, I think the end game on this movie was a huge disappointment. And the ending sequences just felt kinda tacked on. I saw 10 Cloverfield Lane  (reviewed here) the previous evening and, although that film does indeed have an additional ending sequence which brings it into the Cloverfield universe, at least it was a sequence which inspired terror in the audience. In The Boy, it was more apt to inspire laughter, as it transpired.

A saving feature of the movie is Bear McCreary’s score but I was less enamoured of this one than his two other recent masterpieces The Forest (reviewed here) and the aforementioned 10 Cloverfield Lane. His score to The Boy is less what I would recognise as the ‘McCreary sound’ but at least it’s appropriate to the on screen visuals and works okay as a stand alone listen, away from the movie. The music from the last act may resemble an 1980s, cheesy straight to VHS release from your local newsagent in tone but... like I said... that’s actually pretty appropriate to what we’re getting up on the screen during these moments so the composer does pretty well with the material he’s got to work with. I’ll certainly be spinning the CD a fair bit, which is more than I can say for the movie, when it gets a home video release... I won’t be watching this one again.

If you’re a fan of horror movies then the first three quarters of The Boy is pretty cool... but you might find yourself let down at the end. I can’t imagine anyone without an interest in certain 1980s sub-genres of mainstream thrillers are going to get a hell of a lot out of this one, however. Not something I could really recommend and it’s a real shame because I think the basic premise of this one works really well, up until a certain point. Not up to scratch though, at least for me, as far as scary doll movies are concerned. Approach with caution.