Producers: Tripp Vinson, James Vanderbilt, William Sherak and Bradley J. Fischer   Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett   Screenplay: Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy   Cast: Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, Elijah Wood, Néstor Carbonell, Kevin Durand, Olivia Chang, Varun Saranga, Nadeem Umar-Khitab, Juan Pablo Romero, Masa Lizdek, Maia Jae, Daniel Beirne, Antony Hall, Kara Wooten, Grant Nickalls and David Cronenberg   Distributor: Searchlight Pictures

Grade: C-

What can you expect from this sequel to the 2019 horror hit?  More of the same, but bigger, dumber and, even for inveterate genre fans, less fun.  If you’re not one of those fans, you’re likely to find it over-the-top nasty but curiously dull.

“Here I Come” takes up where its predecessor left off.  Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving), having survived the attempts of the Satanically-connected Le Domas family, including her new hubby, to kill her on her wedding night, is carted off to a hospital where she’s questioned by a detective (Grant Nickalls) and reunited with her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton).  (One wonders whether there are a couple more siblings named Hope and Charity waiting in the wings in case they’re needed for further installments.) 

The sisters barely have time to acknowledge one another before they’re attacked by a maniacal knife-wielding guy later identified as Bill Wilkinson (Kevin Durand).  After he blows up in a splatter of blood and gore—you remember such spontaneous combustions from the first movie—the sisters are gassed and carted off, bound and gagged, for another game of potentially fatal hide-and-seek.

That’s because the now-extinguished Le Dumases represented only one of six elite families that made up the Council of Le Bail (i.e., Satan), a group of half-dozen super-elites who in effect rule the world.   With their demise the board was reduced to five, and then with Wilkinson’s explosion (for beginning the game prematurely), to four.  Only another round of the game can determine which of the surviving families will become dominant. 

Chester Danforth (David Cronenberg), the head of a casino-owning clan, currently holds the chief position on the board, but he takes drastic action once he hears the news.  That’s because according to rules that are laboriously laid out for us by the Council’s lawyer (Elijah Wood), the oldest member in each of the surviving families must try to kill Grace before dawn.  The winner will replace Chester. But if any of them dies, the next eldest must take his or her place (or so it seems; sometimes they simply explode, the rules being oddly elastic).  If all the contestant family members perish, the power will pass to Grace.  (Whether the board will be increased to a full complement of a half-dozen families is never revealed.)  Frail Chester instructs his twin children Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy) to smother him so the Danforth family will be better represented in the game.

Grsce and Faith, handcuffed, are sent onto the Danforth estate, and Ursula, armed with an old pistol, and Titus, with what resembles a mace, pursue them (presumably as twins both can participate), along with Ignacio El Caido (Néstor Carbonell), who has a high-powered rifle, Viraj Rajan (Nadeem Umar-Khitab), who wears a mask and wields a sword, and Wan Chen Xing (Olivia Cheng), another swordsperson.  (All are said to sport weapons contemporary with the time their families joined the Council, though that explains nothing.  What’s supposed to be amusing is that most prove inept at using them.)

All these rules sound ridiculously arbitrary, but they’re made more absurd by the fact that whenever the plot needs a kick, the Lawyer can add others—one cannot kill a competitor (you’ll explode), but you can kill a relative, and if Grace agrees to marry a contestant, she’ll live and the game will end.  A contestant can also abdicate in favor of the next in his family’s line, an asterisk employed for humorous purposes when Nadeem’s younger brother Madhu (Varun Saranga) does so in favor of his reluctant wife Martina (Masa Lizdek)—which raises the question of why Chester didn’t make use of that provision rather than being smothered to death.  An element of personal enmity is added to the mix when Francesca El Caido (Maia Jae), the fiancée Alex Le Domas jilted when he married Grace, replaces her father to take vengeance on her rival.  (But wouldn’t she have had to go through the hide-and-seek game if they’d married?)

It’s also supposed to be hilarious to watch the non-combatant family members watching the action on monitors in the Danforth rec room, cheering on their champion or fearing they might have to replace him or her. 

All this elaborate but inconsistent rigamarole points up the fact that “Here I Come” isn’t a puzzle movie inviting the audience to figure out some clever plot but merely an invitation to wallow in mindless violence and gore.  It’s also supposed to be funny, but the humor isn’t so much black as non-existent.  Except for an episode in which a contestant is trapped in a hotel laundry machine and sanitized into mush, the deaths tend not to be very imaginative—mostly the result of stabbings or brute force.  Some of the pummeling endured by the MacCaullays is so bloody and vicious (especially that administered by Hatosy, who on the evidence here has little aptitude for comedy) that they’re stomach-churning.

And yet the action, while choreographically uninspired as staged by directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett  and cut by editor Jay Prychidny, at least has some empty energy, which can’t be said for the convenient lulls during which Grace and Faith indulge in tiresome bickering about the causes of their estrangement, as if their characters had the remotest hint of depth to which we could respond as they predictably bond over their shared struggle to survive.  Weaving merely repeats the screaming victim she played in the previous picture, while Newton must just serve alternately as the person who saves Grace from yet another close call or as bait to force her sister to capitulate.  The sole unusual element is that this is the rare horror movie in which there are two final girls, since both make it to the big finale, part wedding and part coronation, in which the whole Satanic cabal meet to celebrate a victory that proves short-lived.  (It ends with a gush of blood from an underground chamber that’s much less effective than the one that followed Johnny Depp’s sinking into his mattress in the original “Nightmare on Elm Street.”)

Still, Weaving and Newton are comparatively tolerable compared to most of the other cast members, most of whom are encouraged to ham up their caricatures (one hesitates to call them characters) to exorbitant lengths.  Cronenberg, though, manages to get through his cameo with dignity largely intact, though one wishes that instead of wasting his time on this stuff he’d put it to far better use preparing a film of his own.  And Wood glides through the movie with a knowing smirk that’s aimed at the dunderheads in the cult but might also be intended as a comment on the movie itself, or perhaps its viewers.

Visually the movie is a garish live-action cartoon, an effect to which production designer Andrew Stearn, costumer Avery Plewes and cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz all contribute.  For the most part Sven Faulconer’s score falls into the usual patterns, but was it really necessary to debase Vivaldi’s “Gloria” not once but twice by inserting the opening chorus into the soundtrack?

There’s a built-in audience out there for “Here I Come,” but one hopes they’ll make it clear that two servings of this franchise are more than enough.