"Gonger II" is a German 1.5-hour film from 2010 and as the title already says it is the sequel to the original film from 2008. The latter was already fairly weak, but this one here is even worse. Director Theede did not return, so Philipp Osthus, a relatively experienced television filmmaker took over for this small screen sequel we got here. The writers returned and this made clear that you could not expect quality in here. I am still surprised how badly it turned out. Several actors returned, such as Sebastian Ströbel playing the main character. But the writing is really bad overall and some of the actors manage the impossible of letting an already horrible script look even worse with their hopeless line delivery. They shouldn't even be called actors to be honest. This film is also known as "Gonger - Das Böse schläft nie" or "Gonger 2 - Das Böse kehrt zurück" and evil did indeed return in terms of filmmaking quality. Some famous horror film references alone just won't be sufficient anymore if everything else is garbage. The ending looked a bit as if they had a third film in mind, but luckily it never happened. The most disappointing thing is that, even with 3 hours time (90 minutes here, 90 minutes in the first) they never managed to elaborate convincingly on the Gonger phenomenon or explain it satisfyingly. Until the very end I was still tempted to give this one 2 stars out of 5, but I just can't with how much worse this is than the already pretty bad first film. The only reason why I cannot say the series should have ended after the first film is because I think it never should have been launched in the beginning. Huge thumbs-down for this one here, absolutely not recommended. It's not scary, not thrilling, not entertaining. Nothing.
Review of Gonger II
