The takeaway my peers and I had when walking out of Shane Black’s The Nice Guys was how we would all be invested in a follow-up with the Russell Crowe/Ryan Gosling duo. We would watch another sequel, series, 30-second commercial of those two characters working together again in some ridiculous way. With James Wan’s latest film, The Conjuring 2, following the successful 2013 film and the (stupid but profitable) 2014 spin-off Annabelle, there’s definitely a sense of wanting to see these characters return again and again. In this case the characters in question are Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga’s Ed and Lorraine Warren. It’s a hard balancing act to make them likable, seeing as these versions of the Warrens paint them in a positive light that shows us a very loving and spiritual couple who are not out to scam people out of their money but are there because they know and believe in the supernatural. That’s all well and good but the final moments of the movie, wherein we return to their room of cursed objects to cap the film just as the first one had, the film is asking us if we are willing to return to watch these two go to battle with demons and spirits again.

I appreciate the episodic nature of the two films, they build on the Warrens as characters and the awkward position they are put into when being characterized as frauds and this movie isn’t afraid to put skepticism at its center. That being said, I definitely got the sense of Scooby-Doo familiarity; in that there was nothing new or surprising to expect here, it’s still a guy in a mask (or a demon in the body of a girl). The gem of the original is not only the aesthetic of 1971 and the real-world angle of using the Warrens as main characters, as opposed to secondary ones who come in in the 2nd act of a film to sense out the demon, but also the solitary setting and tension-filled atmosphere. But this time around, it’s more of the same. It’s still the 70s, it’s still a house with weird things happening, it’s a big poor family being tormented, and a female family member gets possessed. Does this mean that the movie is bad? Not necessarily, but it’s the second hour that truly kills the momentum that the first hour so nicely kept up with.

The mystery of the supernatural doesn’t really exist in this universe, we know these things are happening which makes the film’s second act delay of getting to the point with these long discussions about whether or not the family is faking the situation a bit tin-eared. The real clash is trying to see Wan juxtapose real-life events with his own glamorous Hollywood-version of the events; both “cases” in the movie are based on true-stories. The film focuses on the Amityville house, in what is considerably a better Amityville film than most, but also walks this odd line of divulging into how the entire thing wasn’t real and at the same time saying that it was. Then the Enfield story begins which again comes to a grinding halt as characters decide whether or not all of this is a hoax. In reality, it’s questionable at best. But this movie isn’t trying to dissect the paranormal subgenre with a film about two hoaxers, it’s playing it straight and taking these spooky ghosts at face value. Someday I hope we will see that movie.

So what we’re left with is a haunted house romp. This is all well and good, the scares are built up rather nicely and the performances of the children (Madison Wolfe plays the main girl Janet) very genuinely. It’s a bit comical how the other children are put to the side once Janet takes center stage, to the point that one of the brothers is so non-existent in the movie until it needs a scary thing to happen to him, then he is quickly forgotten about after that. The other younger brother has an adorable stutter that…doesn’t build to anything either other than a Babadook-esque creature that should have only appeared once. I find myself at odds here, I appreciate how the demon takes forms and different appearances as opposed to so many cheaper movies that just opt to not show the ghosts at all, but the creatures we have here were about as effective as the props you find in a Halloween store. There is a great scene involving a painting of a nun, which illustrates the overall issue I have with the film: Good pacing, not a lot of subtly. At the expense of spoiling a key revelation late in the film, I will say that there’s a bit of hand-holding here when explaining all of the who’s and what’s of why everything has been happening, so much so that I’d be shocked if someone didn’t notice the glaring clue that kept popping up in the Warren’s house repeatedly.

There is nothing wrong with this movie, it is serviceable, it is well-acted, it is well-made, and I don’t want to shoe-horn this in with lesser supernatural movies because it is better than those but I cannot muster up any kind of excitement for it. There’s something about Scooby-Doo and Shaggy always foiling the bad guy that was triumphant and worth watching over and over again, or maybe because the show was short, animated, had a fucking talking dog and didn’t take itself seriously which is why I liked it so much. The Conjuring 2 didn’t exactly leave me clamoring for more tales about the Warrens: Demon Hunters, which could be a casualty for having returning characters in a horror movie or probably because this movie was a dull mixture of the first film and The Exorcist (and Poltergiest and The Entity and The Babadook with a dash of Phantasm).

If you’re a dumb teenage kid looking for a good scare, this is for you even though it’s rated R (because life is unfair). If you’re anything else, watch The Exorcist. Show your baby The Exorcist.