A Haunted House 2 (2014)

A Haunted House 2 arrives as the second installment in a franchise built on the premise that found-footage horror films are funnier when you shout at them. Marlon Wayans returns as Malcolm, now shacked up with Megan (Jaime Pressly) and her two children in a house that immediately begins behaving badly. The safe crushes the dog. The doll named Abigail has opinions. Malcolm films everything. The film's comic strategy is volume: if a gag fails, another is thrown within seconds, and another after that, until the runtime expires.

The picture's social content is worth cataloguing, if only because there is so little of it. The cast is majority Black, a fact that reflects the Wayans Brothers' commercial brand and nothing resembling an argument. Race surfaces repeatedly as comic material, with the neighbor Miguel accusing Malcolm of racism whenever a Mexican stereotype is mentioned, and church women commenting on Malcolm's white girlfriend. These are jokes aimed at racial discourse, not statements about it. The effeminate son Wyatt is a running gag rather than a character. The sexual humor is raunchy and objectifying throughout. We search for affirmation here and find a punchline instead.

The film has no sermon to deliver. It has no interest in instructing its audience on climate, capital, body image, or history. It wants only the next laugh, and it pursues that laugh with a desperation that critics found exhausting. The reviews were brutal. The film was not, in the end, very funny. But it was never pretending to be anything else, which is its own kind of honesty.