Director: Colin Krawchuk
Year: 2025
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural Slasher
Plot:
Trying to keep her love of magic alive, a teen meets up with a bizarre magician while out on her usual trick-or-treating festivities and shows him up on a card trick, forcing him to bring her along on a special quest to harvest souls before a special curse comes to fruition.
Review:
This was an improvement on the original, even though it has some issues. Most of what makes this one work comes from the rather strong connection established here involving the young girl and the magician killer following her around. The fact that the two meet up the way they do, where she's in the diner after performing and tries to showcase an enthusiasm for the same type of magic tricks he’s performing for her, but when she does so to the point of showing him up at his game, the downward spiral that emerges comes across as a great touch when he fails to commit a series of simple tricks for customers. The whole thing comes together once we learn the backstory about how the supernatural curse comes together and the impact it has on him to do what he does in the first place, before turning to offer up the motivation for why she’s a target of his attention rather than homicidal urges, making for plenty of intrigue for this one as it goes along.
That setup is played out rather nicely with the expanded series of magic tricks and card games he plays with victims, setting up a series of great gore gags throughout here. Opening on a lonely guy at a frat party who wanted to talk to a girl he liked, only for him to meet the Jester and get turned into a piñata instead, this comes off incredibly well to start the film. Other encounters, including him supernaturally manipulating intervening police officers to kill themselves or saving her from a sketchy figure supposedly taking her to the authorities, offer up some impressive scenes while using the element of magic in the setup. Having the killer remain pretty much the same as the original, where his form and mannerisms are smooth and eerie due to the silence during the performance of the masked and costumed killer, makes for a great time here to lift it up over the original.
There are some drawbacks to the film that hold it down. The biggest issue with this one is the seemingly repetitive and one-note appearance this has, leading into the middle portions of the story. This becomes a seemingly endless rendition of the two of them meeting up together, he fills her in on the nature of his backstory, and why he’s going through the trouble of performing tricks on others, and then she backs out of fulfilling that order for him, so he gets angry and pulls off a gruesome kill to force them together again. This staging is easy to spot and becomes immensely aggravating when it becomes obvious that’s the only real story this part of the film has, as everything we learn is given, and nothing new comes of him running into new victims to kill off. As well, it also struggles with keeping the finale from being all that obvious and easy to spot, being quite aware of what’s going to happen from the start, so it lacks the kind of intrigue it should’ve had, which all keep this one down.
Overview: ***/5
A more enjoyable sequel, even with some issues, this one comes together rather nicely as there are some worthwhile features present that are enough to counterbalance the drawbacks within this one. Those who enjoy this kind of genre fare, who enjoyed the original, or don’t mind the flaws, will have the most to like here, while other viewers might want to heed caution.
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