I’m a fan of the directors and their movies, and now there are sequels, so naturally I had to check them out. Of note is that hottie Stephen Staley, who is racking up a horror resume in the UK, appears in three of these four films. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do any shirtless scenes this time around. Therefore, I’ve supplied a picture.
TOOTH FAIRY: DRILL TO KILL (2022)
I recently covered the fourth film in this franchise from director Louisa Warren and was happy that it was given a fresh start. This fifth installment is a direct sequel to that film, and as is common with sequels, it just takes everything that made its predecessor good and exploits it to numbing levels.
It also does something we’ve seen plenty of times before. It pushes the horror problem onto someone else. The survivor from film 4 works at a school with her sister, who ends up inheriting the haunting by the tooth fairy.
While the tooth fairy’s penchant for standing outside people’s doors knocking was super effective in the previous film, here she does it so much that it loses its impact.
Other than that, she does what she does best—bashes people with a hammer and chisels out their teeth. It’s more of the same, just in a school this time. The series is definitely starting to wear thin at this point.
DEMONIC PLASTIC SURGEON, MD (2022)
Louisa Warren brings us a sequel to her film Doctor Carver—no matter what names the distributor gives these movies, they’ll always be Doctor Carver movies to me. This sequel even features some returning characters. Clever little twist—the main girl is played by a different actress, who blames looking different on plastic surgery.
While the first film was a commentary on predatory modeling agencies, this sequel is more about aging and plastic surgery addiction.
Would you believe characters that were wannabe models in the first film all somehow end up coming to work at the same old ladies home? That includes the survivors of the first film and the evil nurse that assisted Doctor Carver.
As in the first film, any time the doctor and nurse torture a new victim with plastic surgery, the whole screen is lit in red. Scenes start to feel very reminiscent of The Dentist, especially since one sequence features an old lady getting (what remains of) her teeth extracted.
The film also goes for a sleazier, trashy edge, including a resident who shits her pants constantly, a dude who gets a blow job from an old lady, and a sex scene in which “plastic surgery” begins to melt off the woman onto the guy.
Note that there are a few kills along the way, however most of the horror chaos happens at the end of the film in a long sequence in which everyone is tortured all at once.
CONJURING THE GENIE 2 (2022)
I really liked the first Conjuring the Genie, which came from one of my fave indie directors, Scott Jeffrey. This time he simply, produces, doesn’t direct.
Just like the latest Tooth Fairy film I cover above, this sequel is a been-there-done-that situation. However, the genie looks creepier this time, and is almost always drenched in haunting blue light.
The film does what it needs to do to gather a new set of victims. After learning about what happened in the first movie, an author looking for something new to write about gets her writing group to participate in another conjuring.
As the genie visits each group member to grant them their wish—which involves incorrectly interpreting the wish on purpose to bring them pain and suffering—it also terrorizes our main author girl, who made a wish for her comatose mother to wake up. Uh-oh.
Despite a more streamlined plot than some of the weirdness that went on in the first film, this is a fairly generic supernatural specter slasher.
CULT OF HUMPTY DUMPTY (Curse of Humpty Dumpty 2) (2022)
The first film was an entertaining and fun killer doll movie from Scott Jeffrey, who once again doesn’t direct, unless he’s releasing these sequels under a pseudonym. The second film goes the Halloween 6 Thorn cult route. Humpty Dumpty gets help from cult members when he kills his victims! Blah.
A bunch of school girls gets sent to an ecological garden preserve to do some character building work. It’s clearly a nutty place from the start—for instance, the people that run it revel in the fact that their vegetables are grown by simply funneling their sewer line into the garden for fertilizer. I guess that’s where the dumpty part comes in…
Featuring a group of pretty girls at a country camp, this could have been a fun slasher romp, but Humpty Dumpty is really overshadowed by the plot line about the cult. The first film was much better—although it is enjoyable watching the cult feed live victims to Humpty Dumpty, which is definitely a new aspect to the Humpty legacy.
