Jing Cheng 81 hao 2 [The House that Never Dies II] (2017)

(On Cable TV, November 2020) Sometimes, even a hackneyed story can be interesting when it’s executed differently, and that’s how Chinese film The House that Never Dies II can feel intriguing even as it crawls through the usual haunted house horror clichés. By its quality of being set in Beijing and playing with tropes from a Chinese perspective, it distinguishes itself from many other haunted house movies from the Hollywood factory. Still, this distinction merely raises the film to a watchable quality—and much of the interest revolves around individual scenes rather than the overall result: Far too long, even at scarcely more than 90 minutes, The House that Never Dies II loses itself by over-explaining historical information that should have been dealt with in the first film, and doesn’t manage to make much use out of the dual-timeline structure. It does better in terms of individual horror set-pieces, even if those are also somewhat similar to the American horror corpus. Still, it’s an interesting look at how other cultures can adapt (and, in many cases, imitate) classic Hollywood tropes.