Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel

Director: Steve Cognetti

Viewed on Shudder

 

Summary: A documentary crew ventures to the Abaddon Hotel eight years after the initial tragedy at Hell House in 2009. The viewer realizes the true horror is that they are now watching a terrible sequel to a good movie.

 

Not too long ago I reviewed a film called Hell House LLC from first time director Stephen Cognetti. A lot of people, including me, were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the movie, with Hell House LLC becoming a great new example of how low budget filmmaking can be done right even if the premise, a group of people start setting up a “Haunted House” in an abandoned hotel that is actually haunted and spooks happen, isn’t particularly groundbreaking. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was a solid film that hinted at a promising new director entering the horror field. Now, two years after the release of the first film, Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel has been released and I was pretty excited to see what direction they were going to take with it. Does this sequel live up to the success of its predecessor? Let’s find out! But the answer is no.

Okay, I’m not trying to be flippant about this. Let me explain my feelings a bit further by talking about the differences between the original and its sequel. Hell House LLC had a lot of stuff that worked in it. It had a small, solid cast of characters who all had somewhat realistic dialogue and clear motives as to what they were doing and why they were doing it. The character dynamics were well thought out and that reinforced the slow buildup of scares and the power of the scares that we were shown. But, late in the movie everything kind of falls apart; too much is explained, like the fact that the hotel was run by a Satanist whose group all committed suicide in the dining room of the hotel and they now appear as these robed demon ghost things. That was really dumb, but I bought into the rest of the movie enough to forgive those issues in an otherwise good movie. Hell House II doubles down on everything that didn’t work in the first film.

 

The plot of Hell House II: The Abaddon Hotel centers around a documentary team trying to find evidence about what happened at Hell House LLC on the fateful night of its opening in 2009. It is now eight years later and the lead of the documentary team received an anonymous letter stating that evidence about what happened is on tapes hidden in the basement of the abandoned hotel. Teaming up with the lone survivor of the documentary team from the first film and a ghost hunter/medium guy with his own show, they all go into the Abaddon Hotel to find the evidence and put to rest what really happened.

 

It’s an okay plot but what immediately bothered me about it is that this is the exact same setup that the first film had! I don’t expect anyone to remember that, hell even I forgot at first, but the first movie had its own framing device. It was being made as a documentary by a group trying to parse out the events that resulted in the deaths of fifteen people on the opening night of Hell House LLC! They conducted interviews, compiled police footage, and went into the hotel to see if they could find anything. Almost all of those exact same things happen in Hell House II.

 

To make matters worse, the scares have been just neutered. The ending of the first film had the documentary team fall victim to the robed demon ghosts associated with the Satanist owner of the Abaddon Hotel, Andrew Tully. Those robed figures look silly, not intimidating in the slightest, and the story about Tully being a Satanic cult leader is just dated and poorly executed. With all that said I thought this sequel would be a great time to course correct and leave all the cult stuff and hooded figures behind, because none of it worked. Unfortunately the hooded figures are now even more central to the plot and show up far more often. The classic and well-planned jump scare moments that were present in Hell House LLC have been replaced by this bland slog of shoving people with scary makeup on in front of the camera in hopes that this will somehow replicate the awesome moments scattered throughout the first film. Here’s a tip for found footage horror directors: if the lights go out in your movie the audience knows that there is going to be a spook in frame when the lights go back on. It isn’t scary anymore. We know it is coming.

 

Let me stop rambling and get back into the characters and what actually happens in Hell House II. The main cast is exactly who you’d expect, the determined leader of the documentary team who wants to get to the bottom of this by any means necessary, the jokey camera guy who wisecracks, the shaken member of the last team who is trying to make sure everyone knows the dangers of what they’re doing, the scared co-host who gets dragged into this investigation, and finally Brock Davies, the host of a ghost hunter/medium TV show who was the only character I was interested in. Everyone here is pretty cliche, but Brock at least seemed like he was going to have a character arc and maybe reveal that his “talents” are just for show and not real. Hell, he even has the standard ‘medium talking and being spooky’ voice which he drops for one line of dialogue and that lead me to believe that he is a bullshit artist trying to get a payday. That’s a fine premise for a found footage movie, even if it was already done in Grave Encounters, and I would have preferred that to what he have here. And no, Brock never gets any character development.

 

The only real difference between the stories of the two movies is that what was the frame story of Hell House LLC is now the main story of Hell House II and while people walking into a haunted hotel and immediately getting spooked is fine for a few minutes of frame story to conclude the movie, there isn’t nearly enough plot to sustain a full movie with that. So while we wander around the hotel with this group we also see segments of interviews done about the 2009 incident at Hell House and short snippets of footage of other people relating stories about the Abaddon Hotel or filming themselves entering and getting spooked. Really, I don’t know why the town hasn’t just demolished this place in the eight years since the incident. There is never any mention of who owns it, and it is clearly just a public nuisance at this point, so tear that thing down!

 

I don’t want to get into spoiler territory for this movie because it was just released about two months ago but I will describe my feelings about the ending. The ending is everything wrong with how horror can be written. Someone comes out and just explains everything that has happened and everything that will happen, leaving none of the mysteries from the first film intact, mildly ruining the first movie in the process. It was so frustrating and unbelievable that I can barely believe that I even witnessed it, and what made it worse was the awful dialogue everyone was spewing at each other. Now, the first film had pretty natural dialogue and I wouldn’t be shocked if I learned some of those lines were improvised, but Hell House II’s dialogue is so wooden and standard that I could never get past how unbelievable everyone was, which wasn’t helped by the less than stellar performances from the main cast. Also while the super final main bad guy explains the plot he quotes a song from a Disney movie and I nearly had a brain aneurysm trying to process that.

 

I could talk about this all day but I think I’m going to stop here. You can probably tell what I thought about this film but I’ll reiterate just to be clear. I did not like this movie. Hell House II completely misunderstands what was good about the first film, the story and continuity are convoluted and silly, the villains are bland and forgettable and there is no interesting character drama. Also the movie pointed out when the jumpscares would happen. Because that’s a good idea. Okay, I think I’m done, time to go do something that doesn’t make me furious. No, I don’t recommend this.