Slasher sequel In a Violent Nature 2, which secretly screened a work print of the locked picture at Fantastic Fest, doubles down on showstopping kills while dropping the unique angle that set it apart. Undead Johnny (Ry Barrett) is back to carve up a summer camp, delivering no shortage of showstopping gore, but losing the killer’s POV also robs this sequel of personality.
Writer/Director Chris Nash is back at the helm, this time sharing directing credit with Nate Wilson. Also back are the over-the-top, insanely violent kills, a lack of nondiegetic score, and silent stretches of stomping through the woods. What’s different, though, is that this sequel is set at Camp Puddingstone, where bullied camper Alex (Lucas Nguyen) summons Johnny to enact vengeance upon his tormenters.
The only problem is that those campers are long gone by the time Johnny arrives, leaving only Alex, his sister Julie (Olivia Scriven), and her fellow camp counselors celebrating the end of season as targets for slaughter instead.
It turns out that Johnny’s silent, unstoppable killer perspective is far more interesting than that of an awkward, sullen tween who’s unleashed a massacre upon familiar Friday the 13th archetypes. Though just a kid, and a constantly picked-on one at that, Alex makes for a rough protagonist to track through the carnage for his repellent behavior that includes creeping on crush Olga (Laurie Babin), bullying another social outcast, and passivity as he watches all of the counselors succumb to increasingly gnarly deaths.
The sequel shackles us to a terrible version of Tommy Jarvis, leaving most of the insanely high body count off screen, with their eviscerated corpses leaving a trail to be discovered. That’s not to say it skimps on memorable deaths, though; Nash and Wilson not only top the yoga-pretzel kill of the first with a gruesomely protracted stand-out sequence but also deliver a solid handful of crowd-pleasing kills that’ll leave gorehounds howling.
The emphasis on practical effects continues here, too, ensuring each extreme burst of ultraviolence sears into your skull. Though we spend less time with Johnny this round, appearing only to stalk then graphically slash, Barrett’s Johnny remains an unstoppable force of barbaric evil. His physicality terrifies and intimidates; this is a killing machine who takes pride in his “art.”
The movie springs to life any time Johnny is on screen; it’s everything else around it that drags this sequel down. That’s not just reflected in a dream-like sequence that sees a shell-shocked Olga lead Alex to safety in a haze, only for this sequence to end on a deeply confusing note. It’s also in the film’s final scenes that clumsily harkens back to the first film.
In a Violent Nature 2‘s fairly padded runtime winds up creating a repetitive pattern that sees an uninteresting young lead evade and dodge Johnny as everyone around him gets bisected, sliced, crushed, and, well, much, much worse. But whereas the lack of interiority was understandable in an undead, silent killer, it’s far more puzzling in a lead so closed off that he refuses to even open up to his sister.
There’s never any sense that Alex is in any real danger either, leaving both him and the viewer as passive observers to a summer camp slasher we’ve seen many times before. To be fair, that’s reflective of Johnny’s urban legend, but it robs much of this sequel of any real tension.
As a showcase of stunning practical effects and slasher carnage, In a Violent Nature 2 tops its predecessor with ease. That’ll be more than enough for those looking for a fun time, but this sequel doesn’t have much to offer beyond its inventive gore.
In A Violent Nature 2 made its premiere at Fantastic Fest and is coming soon from Independent Film Company and Shudder.
