Dead in 3 Days 2 (2008)

Thanks for the memories!

Nice effects though.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

This one is even worse than it's already bad prequel "In 3 Tagen bist du tot". The first one was a rip-off of American teen slashers, this one is clearly a rip-off of the hugely popular and much imitated "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" from Tobe Hooper. And the title is just misleading, at least in the first one there was some connection, but here, it doesn't matter. They could it "Alphütten Massaker" or something like that, that would fit much better, and just make a "new" movie rather than do that as a sequel. So if you know "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" you kind of know what you will get, just worse, kind of boring, and set in a snowy Austrian mountain village.

"In 3 Tagen bist du tot 2" is an Austrian German-language movie from 8 years ago. The writer and director is again Andreas Prochaska and this movie here follows the story of Nina (played by Sabrina Reiter) after surviving the killer from the first film from 2 years earlier. Well.. what can I say? This film is the perfect example of what a sequel should not look like. I cannot blame them for not including most of the people from the first film as they were all dead. But I can blame them for making a film that has hardly any connection to the first apart from several references to the final shot at the hospital from the first film. This is not enough though. Not even close.Apart from that the film goes constantly for close-up shots, loud screaming and lots of violence too. I would be fairly fine with that if the story required it, but the story is barely existent here. This film is just a collection of scary moments one after the other and at the latest halfway into this film you forget there even is a story. The characters are entirely forgettable. This film is really just a despicable attempt of cashing in with the apparently pretty successful first film and still milk some more money from it. If I had not watched the first film right before and if the title had been different, this could have been very well a movie that stands on its own. At least in theory as in terms of story and characters it needs crutches to do something remotely close of standing.And what makes this even worse is that the film runs for over 110 minutes, considerably longer than the first. But the material just is not there. This was a very uninteresting and boring watch from start to finish. I am baffled by this film having a higher rating than the first. I am not a great fan of the first either, but it was way superior to this one here. At least the first has 2 or 3 pretty decent moments and a story that is not too uninteresting for the most part. This sequel here has none of the above. At least Prochaska stepped up his game considerably in recent years as "Dead in 3 Days 2" is a complete failure. Not recommended.

A rare case of the sequel surpassing the original.Admittedly - in this case this was not too hard. "In 3 Tagen bist du tot" was a formulaic teenie slasher that only genre fans will find entertaining. Part 2 however is a completely different animal. It is not a rehash of the same plot. Part 1 merely provides the back story for part 2 to unfold a gripping suspense thriller.It's not Shakespeare, mind you. The story is not exactly intellectual and you still have all the classic horror shock effects and lots and lots of gore. On the other hand the setting is so down-to-earth that it becomes almost believable at times.The final half hour is what transforms this movie from "good sequel" to "really good movie". A horror movie usually makes you guess who the bad guy is. This one makes you doubt who the good guy is. Terrific! If you liked part 1, then definitely check out this one. If you did not like part 1, still check out this one. The only excuse I'll accept is that you don't like horror at all.

...in that sequels are always a little worse than their predecessors. "In 3 Tagen bist du tot 2" is a desperate attempt to repeat the success of part 1 by cashing in on the title. Other than a few characters returning, this movie has nothing to do with the story that it is supposedly continuing (the most glaring omission being the fact that no one in this movie ever gets a text message saying that the receiver of the message will die within the following three days).Fair enough. If they got an interesting story to tell, why not use an already popular name to sell it, right? The problem is that the story isn't very interesting at all. The first half of the movie is extremely tedious, the second one is filled with clichés. There are hardly any surprises at all. How many more times are we supposed to jump at the old trick where something terrible appears in the mirror from one shot to the next? How often do we need to see a steadicam-around-the-waist-shot à la Aronofsky?On the plus side, though, director Andreas Prochaska does get a few things right again. The cinematography is beautiful and Prochaska really knows how to elaborate on the creepiness of old cottages in the mountains, right down to the harsh sociability of a meal of speck and Schnaps or some old soccer stickers on the wall. As he did in part 1, Prochaska presents the Austrian countryside as a place where horrible crimes could take place (made all the more believable by current events such as the abduction and abuse of Natascha Kampusch or the Fritzl family).In the end, "In 3 Tagen bis du tot 2" may not be the most memorable horror movie, but it is another honorable effort at putting Austria on the horror-map. If it helps to create an interest in the genre among Austrian movie financiers, I'm all for it.