Rando! Brahms: The Boy II
When Nathan Rabin’s Happy Cast became Travolta/Cage it gave me what little excuse I needed to stop writing about new theatrical releases regularly. That’s something I’ve always felt a little ambivalent about, perhaps because it’s the element of the website that most closely resembles the positions I held with The A.V Club and The Dissolve and consequently reflect my ambivalence and sadness as to how to both of those roles ended.
But when my friends Alonso Duralde and Dave White gave me an opportunity to watch and talk about a new theatrical release for their wonderful podcast Linoleum Knife, I leaped at the opportunity to experience far and away the worst looking option, a cost-cutting, low-budget, PG-13 sequel to sleeper creepy doll hit The Boy starring Katie Holmes running a brisk 86 minutes.
It looked like the kind of idiotic, violently inessential, wildly unnecessary nonsense that exists to serve as the fourth choice of undiscriminating RedBox consumers who vaguely remember the first one being scary. I am so glad that I chose to see Brahms: The Boy II because it is EXACTLY the kind of screamingly terrible, groaningly cliched, almost unfathomably convoluted hot garbage that has historically given me great joy through the decades, giving me comfort and solace where friends, family and faith have all failed me.
Oh, but I experienced great shivers of guilty enjoyment throughout this low-key atrocity, this muted insult to moviegoer’s intelligence! It reconnected me with the great pleasure I have found laughing at movies, deeply, satisfyingly and consistently. Because movies like Brahms: The Boy II don’t just ask to be laughed at, rather than with: they angrily demand to be laughed at in a mocking, derisive way that alchemizes great gales of hilarity out of some astonishingly shitty sequel storytelling that makes such a demented hash of the mythology of the first film, which was non-supernatural and centered on the old burned murderous lunatic-living-in-the-walls trop that I was reminded of Highlander 2’s legendary, “Fuck it, highlanders are from outer space now?” twist.
Brahms: The Boy II opens, adorably, with its SPOOKY child Jude (Christopher Convery) engaged in his favorite activity: leaping out of the darkness to scare skittish mom Liza (Katie Holmes). Horror fans know this activity as both a “jump scare” and one of the lowest, if not THE lowest form of scare. It’s a scare so cheap that it’s open to question whether it even deserves to be called a scare rather than a fake scare or a cheap shock.
Introducing one of the hoariest fright film cliches as a defining feature of a main character represents a colossal act of chutzpah but then Brahms is overflowing with misplaced audacity; it really commits to every terrible, idiotic, egregiously unrealistic and unconvincing decision.
That extends to having Liza AND Jude endure the genuine scare of a lifetime when the mother is assaulted during a home invasion. The trauma has left the spooky little boy with a thousand yard stare and a case of “selective mutism” that is supposed to be narratively inspired but I like to think is instead a product of the child actor looking at all of his terrible, awkward, undeliverable dialogue and telling the director, “How bout I don’t talk for LONG periods of time? Maybe not ever? Wouldn’t that be WAY spookier than having me say any of these words, wonderful as they all might be?”
I like to think the director and writer looked at each other, conceded that they obviously had no idea what they were doing, and figured they would do it the kid’s way.
To help the shattered family heal during a time of intense emotional duress, they decide to leave a city full of neighbors and police officers and other people so that they can spend some quality time in the heart of Murder County, England, in one of the region’s most notorious Murder Houses.
Their new home’s vibe is “most evil place in the history of the universe” and “leave while you still can!” but that doesn’t keep them from inexplicably setting up shop in this haunted domicile of the damned. They can’t believe their luck when, during one of their first days in this Murder House in the heart of Murder County they come upon a bona fide Murder Doll innocently buried almost completely in the ground, almost as if to contain the great evil it undoubtedly contains.
The confused and overwhelmed parents are, of course, pleased when their Spooky Little Boy becomes the glowering, accommodating sidekick of a creepy doll doppelgänger if it means he’s once again talking, albeit exclusively to say creepy shit.
What parent isn’t overjoyed when their child begins spending ALL of their time with a malevolent doll, almost as if possessed by some manner of eternal evil?
As anyone who has ever set eyes on him is no doubt aware, Brahms radiates pure evil like a Charles Manson rant or a Donald Trump tweet. He epitomizes the innate creepiness of Victorian formality combined with the fundamentally sinister nature of old dolls, the more life-like the scarier.
In 2016, the ghostly preppie man-child’s resemblance to evil little weasel and Trump advisor/son-in-law Jared Kushner was striking. In Brahms: The Boy II it is downright disconcerting. Brahms really is like a porcelain, less evil doll version of Kushner. Brahms: The Boy II establishes in the most histrionic, hilarious possible fashion that Brahms represents an eternal evil that has always existed and will always exist, making it VERY apparent Brahms lived on to "befriend" man-child Donald Trump in the "human" form of Jared Kushner.
Yes, Brahms exudes pure evil and DEFINITELY is responsible for at least a few murders. He’s a Murder Doll, after all. What is a Murder Doll supposed to do if not cause murders, either directly or through his ominous aura?
But Brahms also has Jude talking again, albeit mostly so that he can serve as a more efficient executor of Brahms’ wants and needs. Brahms has a list of instructions his care-takers must follow unless they want to face his homicidal, murder doll rage. But this is such a spectacularly silly, lazy and insulting piece of malfunctioning machinery that it can’t be bothered to actually relay the rules, in part because it’s intent on throwing all the rules that made its predecessor both coherent and an effective fright flick, however cheesy.
For starters, Brahms: The Boy II throws out the conceit that there’s nothing supernatural about Brahms himself. In Brahms: The Boy II whenever mom isn’t looking at Brahms with her one exhausted, defeated facial expression, the evil little fucker’s eyes start darting around like he’s a shifty criminal getting interrogated in an old cartoon.
In entertainment, there is a long history of “funny” dolls for children being accidentally terrifying. Here, however, the doll that is supposed to be terrifying is instead pretty damn hilarious from start to finish.
So what is Brahms here? As frantic Googling and fevered montages of antiquated newspaper clippings reveal, Brahms is an evil Victorian doll who has had made many “owners” under his sinister spell. How deeply intertwined was the evil Murder Doll in all of their lives? He was such a part of the family—the EVIL, MURDEROUS part—that he somehow made it into ALL the family pictures even though by doing so he was leaving behind a clear trail of evidence for the right internet gumshoe to uncover.
Holmes, who exudes serious mom jeans energy here, is canny enough to deduce Brahms’ true nature but not savvy enough to not respond to tragedy and violence and trauma by MOVING HER FAMILY TO A MURDER HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE OF MURDER COUNTY, THEN LETTING HER SON BECOME THE WILLING SLAVE OF A MURDER DOLL.
Like a bewildering number of over-confident, under-competent sequels, this closes by teasing not just a sequel but a whole SLEW of sequels covering Brahms’ reign of evil over time. That means that this wheezing gasp of a would-be franchise could conceivably spawn a sequel but also prequels taking place long before the events of either film.
These shameless mercenaries are setting up Brahms adventures during World War I and the Fabulous Fifties and the Summer of Love and then on December 6th, 1969, when it figures prominently in the fatal Altamont stabbing.
But it seems safe to assume that all subsequent sequels will be relegated to the direct-to-video market after this scare free but unintentionally laughter-rich stinkeroo.
I’m so glad I watched this terrible movie. It made me so happy. I enjoyed so many chuckles at its expense. True, I wish I had not paid twenty dollars for the privilege but if you have the opportunity to experience this for free on Amazon Prime or cable or something then it’s definitely worth 86 minutes of your time precisely because it is so distinctively, transcendently terrible. Brahms is a very bad boy and a guilty good time.
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