Comedy sequels are arguably the most difficult type of follow-up to get right, and as a result, the elephant graveyard of Hollywood history is littered with either second installments that completely miss the mark, or a barrage of cack-handed continuations that run a once-popular premise into the ground, and somewhere near the bottom of the qualitative pile lies A Haunted House 2.
The opening found footage horror comedy was exactly what you’d expect from a Marlon Wayans-fronted parody, so expectations were already low going in. However, it was inevitable a franchise was on the cards when Mike Tiddes’ grim attempt at wringing humor from an uninspired premise hauled in over $60 million at the box office on a $2.5 million budget.
A Haunted House could only rustle up an embarrassing 9 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, but somehow, its successor fared even worse by topping out at a disastrous 8 percent on the aggregation site. Look, we know that rapid-fire spoofs aren’t designed to be high art, but there’s a reason why the likes of Airplane!, The Naked Gun, and Austin Powers are still held in high esteem decades after the fact.
Despite being the inferior sequel to an already-terrible opening salvo, A Haunted House 2 has nonetheless conspired to land a Top 10 spot on the Hulu charts, as per FlixPatrol. Wayans’ brand of lowest common denominator histrionics has proven head-scratchingly popular and lucrative for over 20 years, but at least we can sleep fairly soundly in the knowledge that we’ve managed to make it eight years without a trilogy materializing.
