Main cast: John Littlefield (Hershel), Nadine Stenovitch (Florence), Aimee Stolte (Gemma), Tiana Tuttle (Melanie), Jessica Chancellor (Morgan), Meghan Carrasquillo (Staci), Brittany Bardwell (Emma), Julia Small (Ashlyn), Taelyn Lewis (Brooklyn), Mario Rocha (Andy), Mason Greer (Dawson), and Petri Hawkins Byrd (Cole Hawkins)
Director: Dante Yore
I’m sure someone will write in to point it out, so let me say that yes, that’s a capital H in “PHarm”, and it’s meant to be that way by the people behind this movie. So no, this is not a typo, just movie people being movie people.
Fear PHarm 2 takes place right after the events of Fear PHarm, so there is no way that I can give a synopsis of this movie without revealing the twists and turns of the previous movie. Therefore, folks that want to watch that other movie have best stop reading right here, and maybe come back here after they have watched both movies or something.
Still here? Here comes the spoilers for the previous movie, so don’t say I never warned anyone.
Now, we’re still in the Cool Patch Pumpkin Farm, which boasts a large maze that people go in and out for fun. The family that runs the farm has a dark secret, however: Hershel’s wife was a mad scientist type determined to find the solution to anti-aging, and he and his daughter Gemma continue the woman’s work after she had passed on.
They find that skin that contains the right genetic match can be used as the active ingredient of their anti-aging cream, so they pick victims that have the right genetic profile to try to win money by beating the “VIP Maze”. Inside the maze, Hershel’s many kids, all dressed up as a common horror movie villain, will pick off these folks and drag them to the lab, where their skin will be peeled off them in order to make some people very happy.
It’s a dumb premise, especially considering how impractical and risky it is to kidnap people and killing them off slowly by peeling their skin bit by bit, when it will be easier to just harvest some stem cells and grow skin tissue out of them. After all, they have the technology, or so it seems, to do amazing things, so going the old fashioned route of capturing people and manually ripping their skin piece by skin feel like anachronistic elements included just for the sake of making this one a horror movie.
Anyway, in the previous movie, Melanie was the only one from her friends lured into the VIP Maze that survived. Here, she manages to break herself out, and free a few other captives as well. Clearly, the budget this time has improved, as these folks can now hire a few black actors to round up the cast, and I hear black actors are very expensive. At any rate, these people are now on the run, and the very irate Hershel and Gemma round up their family to recapture these pests.
This sequel does something right: it shifts the focus to the far more interesting villains. Hershel comes off as genuinely terrifying beneath his genial demeanor. As much as he is patient and loving to his staff and family, he can also be very cold and even ruthless to them when he is angered.
Meanwhile Gemma, who comes off as an annoying Harley Quinn cosplayer in the previous movie, becomes a very scary, sadistic villain in her own right here. She also makes it clear that she has her own ideas about things should be run, and these ideas don’t necessarily coincide with her father’s.
What is interesting is that, while they are clearly the smartest of their family, they also are unquestioningly devoted to the family. I find myself oddly enough touched by scenes in which they learn that the runaways have killed their slower family members and are genuinely crushed and furious as a result.
Even more interesting is how the cracks in the relationship between Hershel and Gemma are evident by the end of this movie. I find myself genuinely interested to watch if the third movie were ever made and it would further explore these cracks.
The self-referential and self-aware meta humor is still here, but dialed down a bit to make room for dark, macabre humor. I like this far more, as it fits the mood of this movie better. The whole thing is still a dark comedy, but less farcical than the previous movie—a good thing as it makes the villains far more sinister yet, perversely enough, adorable and sweet at times.
The villains make this movie a far more compelling watch than the previous one, but it still shares some of the flaws as its predecessor. The cast of “younger people” (they don’t look as young as they are supposed to be, as always) exist solely to be killed, so they have very little memorable traits. This also includes Melanie, as the movie completely glosses over her character in order to shift the focus on Hershel and Gemma. These walking dead meats are so annoying, constantly quarreling or doing dumb things even when their lives are on the line, that I am forced to dock an oogie off the final score just because of these irritants.
At any rate, Fear PHarm 2 is such a step up over the previous movie, it’s actually remarkable in a way. It completely reverses my opinion about the whole franchise, and I find myself feeling even wishing that they’d hurry up and make a third movie.
