'Smile 2' Heads into Theaters This Weekend

'Tis the season for horror movies, and this week, theaters will brimming with fright flicks that bring us more of what we've seen before. The new horror sequel release this week is Smile 2, a follow-up that continues the original's very simple premise. Smile 2 will take on last week's box-office winner, Terrifier 3, a franchise installment that's more interested in gore and ultra-violence than genuine scares. The battle will be a bloody one, and it's anyone's guess which violence-fest will come out on top. Read on for details.

Via Variety.

Portraying the life of a diva pop star — or, at least, doing it convincingly — isn’t the easiest thing for a movie to bring off. There are too many real-life counterparts. The director Brady Corbet (“The Brutalist”), teaming up with Natalie Portman, got about halfway there in “Vox Lux.” Lady Gaga, drawing on elements of her own legend but shrewd enough to play the heroine of “A Star Is Born” as not a version of herself, created a character for the ages. More recently, M. Night Shyamalan seemed to make “Trap” mostly to let his budding musician daughter, Saleka Shyamalan, embody a pop singer — which she did with aplomb in concert, less convincingly in the backstage scenes. So when you hear that “Smile 2,” Parker Finn’s sequel to his effective if overloaded creep-out horror film of two years ago, is centered around a pop star, you may not exactly be expecting a deep-dish immersion in the pop-music universe.

The first “Smile,” after all, was a movie in which people were possessed by a weird demon, which caused them to have a breakdown over the course of a week, at which point they would flash an insidious nightmare smile at someone else and proceed to commit suicide directly in front of them, at which point the demon passed into the body of the one who witnessed the suicide. Complicated! Or maybe just convoluted. The premise of “Smile” all made sense, with the host-hopping demon a descendent of the ones from “It Follows” and (going back to the ’80s) “The Hidden.” Yet the movie, vividly staged as it was, often just seemed a glorified vehicle for all those self-mutilating deaths and frozen rictus grins.

“Smile 2” is different. It’s got all that stuff, but it’s a horror film that strives to create a genuine emotional center.

Get the rest of the story at Variety.