Hey! Did you watch the first ‘Evil Bong’ movie and thought it was kinda sorta okay but there wasnt much plot to speak of? Well! Dont you worry! because ‘Evil Bong 2’ is the ‘Incremental improvement’ picture that you’ve been missing your whole life!.. Im serious…Thats literally the best this film gets…kinda, sorta, a little bit better than the first movie in almost every regard. Not enough to out and out make it praiseworthy, but enough that, given the choice, i’d probably pick this one over the first one.

The plot picks up about 6-12 months after the events of the first film, the guys are all out of university and trying to make their way in the world, when something strange befalls the group. They all begin to suffer from increasingly strange side effects, One becomes insatiably horny, the other suffers Narcalepsy and our Jock from the first picture becomes chronically fixed in a state of the munchies.

Whatevers causing these weird issues, the gang figure its something to do with the ‘Evil Bong’ so! they chase down the guy who delivered the bong to them in the first place who tells them they need to go on a secret jungle adventure, where they meet a research team looking into a lost tribe of semi nude women who worship an equally killer Bong. Shenanigans ensue.

And I think the biggest thing to note about ‘Evil Bong 2’ over the original is this is a film that feels much more comfortable in it’s skin than the first movie. The first felt kind of awkward in places as it tried to sell it’s horror elements on an equal footing with it’s comedy ones and the intensly awful stoner humour, forced nudity and awkwardness of the cast having to play roles they didnt seem too comfortable in made the film feel SUPER dated, stiff and a bit awkward at times, not helped by the great saggy middle of the thing which slowed the action right down to a crawl for most of the runtime.

This film feels a lot more at home with what it’s trying to do, its basically apeing the old ‘Lost island explorer’ type movies of the 30s and 40s. The stoner humour is much more played down, we get a wider range of comedy which…still isnt great, but HEY! they’re trying new stuff! The horror element has almost completely been removed, gone are the weird cameos from other franchises, the nudity is massively toned down and kind of makes sense in the context of the movie.

The films pacing is much more refined, the act structure works a lot better and flows more naturally between the acts. It still slows down a bit in the 2nd act, but here rather than it getting painful, the cast (who appear much happier to be on screen this time) manage to bring their stereotypical characters to life a bit more and actually make them a little bit more interesting.

The ‘Evil Bong’ aspect is pretty much held back till the 3rd act where theres a decent enough reveal. Though it’s a little dissapointing at how little the Bongs are intergrated here. It almost feels like Full Moon wanted to make a softcore nudie flick, but then at the last minute realised they could cram some ‘Bong’ in there and make a bit more money in doing so.

In either case, while its still a flawed script, I feel they’ve made some quite nice improvements here, the stakes a bit lower. But the trade off for that is a tighter production that gets the ‘Comedy/Horror’ tone it needed to aim for, that builds on its characters in a way that feels natural and does seem like a series moving in the right direction.

Speaking of, the direction and cine is much the same as the first film too. Which is to say technically, it’s not terrible. But it’s still very much shot for function over form and they’re REALLY relying more and more on a ‘Fix it/Make it look good in Post’ mentality, which really does this thing no favours. sequences tell the story fairly effectively, but theres no real compositional flare or interesting B-roll to help make the sequences spring to life.

90% of the style from this thing comes from Pre rendered CGI assets or harsh colour corrections in post, which makes the thing look a lot cheaper than it probably was to shoot. Which is dissapointing. Its a film thats done the bare minimum and very little else on that front, which was a little bit dissapointing.

I will give some credit to the direction of the cast though, here it seems our characters, rather than being stoned out of the gord for 85 minutes ACTUALLY got something in the way of assistance from the director. The cast are lively, spry, work with there set spaces pretty well and physically animate with a reasonable delivery that matches the circumstances they’re getting into. Its a big set up from the first film and while the dialogue they’re working with still isnt *Amazing*…they actually do seem to make a good go of what they’ve been dealt here…

Speaking of which, the performances themselves are a bit of a mixed bag, I appreciate that sometimes ‘Full Moon’ leans into the ‘So bad it’s good’ style of acting. Im less inclined to enjoy performances where the performer is purposely trying to give a bad performance. It kind of fails the brief if the person doing the bad act is IN on the joke.

Our core cast are mixed to passable i’d say, with the shackles of stonerdom off their shoulders, they do get to work a decent range and seem to be having fun. The supporting cast however is where the film does quite fall down, as you have extras who really wernt that into what they’re doing, or at least giving the vibe of not being *that* into what they’re doing, halfheartedly rolling through the script to get things over with. As such they quite often arnt all that animated and just dont really seem to want to engage with the film. Which does lose it some marks unfortunately.

The scores largely stolen from the first film, but there are some new tracks thrown into the mix that really do help pull the quality of the film up significantly (I honestly cant tell you how happy I am that this thing doesnt have generic ‘full Moon’ scoring)

And all in all? While I absolutley wont say this thing is a vast improvement over the original, it DOES seem to have learned from its mistakes in the first one and has tightned up the ship considerably, producing an end product thats better paced, better acted, *slightly* better shot and feels more at home with what it wants to be and how it wants to do things.

It’s absolutley not without it’s flaws. But I’ll take a step in the right direction over utter dross any day.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/evil-bong-2-king-bong/