Villmark 2 (2015) Reviews

• Hazmat Suits and Bad Decisions

  WisdomsHammer2018-02-24

  This movie takes quite a while to get going and when it finally wraps up, you're left with more questions than answers. It's about a team of people who go into an old asylum building to assess it for hazardous materials. Or something. A sort of librarian goes with them to grab any records that might be worth keeping. They end up being the worst hide and seek players ever in a cat and mouse game between them and an unknown adversary. The kinds of decisions most of these characters make throughout the course of the movie will leave you with little sympathy for them. I found myself hoping they would die - especially the team leader. I did find it scary, creepy, and suspenseful, and I thought it was well shot and performed. I would have liked more of an explanation for what was happening and why, but if the intention was for us to be just as in the dark as the people in the movie, I sort of get it. But I didn't like it. I've seen other reviewers saying that this ripped off Session 9, and I can see why they said that, but I wasn't thinking of Session 9 while watching this. Session 9 was definitely better, though. See that instead.

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• Lacking emotional connection. Things happen and then it's over.

  peefyn2015-11-09

  I was lucky enough to catch an outdoor screening of this in the Norwegian woods. Sadly, despite the name of the movie, it's not really much about the woods this time around. In this movie a crew of people are doing tests and gathering samples of an old asylum/hospital that is to be torn down. The big building is in the middle of nowhere, as it was built for avoiding the spread of tuberculosis. The janitor who has been in charge of the place is a bit difficult to work with, and therein starts the movie's conflict. I actually liked the way that it tied into the first Villmark movie. It's only indirectly, but it's enough so that you get a bit extra from this movie if you have seen the first one. On the surface there's the fact that the hospital uses the lake from the first movie as its water supply, and that the janitor in this movie appears also in Villmark. But they also refer a bit to the WW2-history that is mentioned in the first movie. The make up (or SFX?) in this movie were also quite nice, though I won't go into further details because of spoilers. Now, did I like this movie? No. It does a lot of things correctly, like the setting and the make up, as mentioned. However, unlike the first movie, you barley get to know any of the characters, so when things start happening, you don't really care. There are some jump scare, but the movie doesn't really manage to build much tension. An emotional bond with the character's would have helped immensely, but the movie's attempt to give you brief glimpses into who these guys are, fails miserably. There's also a lot of poor/strange decisions (like in many horror movies). I hated the ending of the previous film, but this movie's ending is actually alright.

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• Bad. Bad. Bad.

  gothic-fiction2015-12-12

  Nothing to do with Villmark 1 !! They barely managed to make a small and quite insignificant connection to it, but that's all, just so they can take advantage of the name and get some attention. If you read the plot, you'll realize you know the movie, you've seen it before, many times and this right here brings nothing new. It's a horror movie in an old building, apparently abandoned but not quite, where people start to get missing or even...dead! And this is all. From head to toes, nothing more than what so many other similar productions brought on screen so many times before. Can't believe I was excited to see this. Anyway, the movie itself, as a stand alone is still a weak production in my opinion. I will not recommend it. Cheers!

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• Great footage, horrible film

  jthaule2017-05-14

  I gave this film a two, and considering the photography, lighting and set design/location are all pure tens, that speaks volumes for the rest of this film. The script and editing is on the level of something you'd expect from a kindergarten child, the acting is horrendous most of the time and the entire film is completely disjointed. The plot, where there is one, suffers from lack of logic, and the characters behave in a way no human ever would. It has everything you'd expect from the worst of Jean Rollin, except the humor and playfulness. It's just not good. I'd love to edit this film down to about five-six minutes and use that footage for a music video, but the film as it is is just junk. The music incidentally is distracting as all hell.

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• Wasted Potential

  blood-lust6662018-01-29

  This Norwegian haunted asylum flick was a take on the 2001 US movie Session 9. Unfortunately for Villmark 2, they failed horribly in that respect. Their attempt at a psychological horror fell flat. The plot was paper thin and never came together because it was never fully realized. What I did love about this movie was the setting. The isolation of the woods, the creepiness of the building, the atmosphere created by amazing visuals. I'm just not sure why the director didn't go another way with the movie. At the beginning, there was so much focus on the contaminated water supply, and I thought it would go the way of the crew contracting a disease from said water. (Think Cabin Fever only in an asylum). That would have been an amazing plot! A plot that actually made sense. But it veered off track at about the halfway mark and decided on a 'experiments gone wrong' angle. That is an angle that is incredibly cliche and so played out in so many other asylum/hospital horror movies. It just felt like lazy writing. And that was so disappointing when the movie had so much potential.

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