Stephen Cognetti’s Hell House LLC was a fun addition to the Found Footage genre, rubbing its filthy, carney gloves all over of the shots and tricks and scares you’ve seen before, tossing them into a familiar formula, and plopping its characters in a suitably creepy locale. The film was both successful enough, acclaimed enough, and intriguing enough that people queued up to see and make a follow-up. Three years later, we return to The Abaddon Hotel.
Hell House LLC 2 works well as a sequel in terms of expanding the lore of the world, answering lingering questions from the original, and continuing the wider arc. We learn more about the hotel’s haunted history and the aftermath of the events of the first film, and the story is presented in a similar way to Part 1, as two separate groups run media stories on Hell House and the tragedy in the hotel. We continue the cutaways to commenters, we dive into additional recovered footage from various events, we witness a Television Panel show discussing the tragedy, and we meet a new group of filmmakers attempting to ‘find the truth’.
Where the film succeeds is, much like the first, in those bitesize scare scenarios which follow a side or central character experiencing something spooky. Where the film falls on its arse somewhat, is with the performances. While the first film was low-budget and featured a cast of unknowns – it was perfectly serviceable and true to character and plot. Here it’s the same deal, except the cast feels like a downgrade in places. The actors portraying Jessica and Molly – two more intrepid truth-seekers – are simply not convincing in these roles, which is a shame given they are among the central characters. One of the panel guests, Arnold Tasselman, is a little better but given his key role, the actor playing this part does not give the level of performance I’d like to have seen. On the flip side, that actor playing the off-camera Mitchell from LLC 1 – here a major on-screen character – gives one of the most assured and convincing performances of the series.
LLC 2 has been largely derided by fans and reviewers of the series. Outside of some of the performances (which aren’t baaad, just not what they needed to be) and possibly outside of the film feeling a little like a remake due to the identikit formula and scares, it’s another enjoyable entry. Your enjoyment will depend on how much mileage you get out of Found Footage – I’m more willing than most to look past what others cannot.
I feel like the film shows too much of its hand by the end – I love the snippets of lore which can potentially lead you down a rabbit hole and send the series off in a hundred directions – but by the end of the film we go too far in what is shown and what is answered. This sets up nicely for LLC 3, but maybe there should have been a LLC 2.5 in there, or this film needed an extra fifteen minutes on its run time. It’s a minor personal quibble, but it certainly felt to me like they unnecessarily shovelled the entire end game and history into the final moments.
The film opens with an as yet unfinished (I think) potential thread – an old home video showing a child, seemingly in a trance, playing a familiar tune on his keyboard and saying something ominous. Flash forward decades and the boy has grown, has a streaming channel, and films himself sneaking into The Abaddon only to encounter something spooky before going missing. We switch to present day and a TV panel show focusing on the history of The Abaddon. Joining the host is Mitchell, the only survivor from the group who interviewed ‘Sara’ in the first movie and released their controversial documentary. He is unhappy with the second guest, a lawyer/representative of Abaddon the town and Hotel who has been doing his part to downplay anything sinister and push back against the wave of conspiracies and visitors to the town – Mitchell feels he is burying the truth. The final guest is a popular ‘professional’ TV ghost hunter who is very curious about the case and would love to film an episode in the hotel. This panel discusses a series of events, peppered with snippets of recent unnerving events featuring people breaking in to the hotel.
Watching the show are whistleblowing journalists Jessica and Molly, who have recently received some information encouraging them to run their own investigation on what really happened. Being intrepid truth-seekers, they conspire to get in touch with Mitchell in the hopes of breaking in to The Abaddon and making sure the public learns what they deserve to know. Mitchell is reluctant, yet oddly calm – he wants to know what happened to his friends as much as anyone, but understands the dangers of entering the hotel. They are joined by the Ghost Hunter and his cameraman, and once more we enter The Abaddon for another round of Spot The Spook.
From this point on, the movie doesn’t let up. We continue to intersperse the story with clips of past events, with revealing outtakes from the TV Panel show, and police footage showing that something terrible has happened and that Jessica seems to be the sole survivor. The scares in these moments are solid, but may be seen as re-treads from the first movie; sudden creepy characters, clowns, glitches etc, but they work. We get a huge dump of lore towards the end which feels like it could have been drip-fed more evenly, but perhaps the film-makers didn’t know if they’d get the chance to make a sequel so wanted to close off as much of the plot as possible, while leaving a few chinks of an opening for a potential third part.
The Abaddon Hotel is seen as the weakest of the series so far, but outside of some casting choices it’s another solid found-footage film and isn’t obviously weaker or stronger than the other three films. It’s a lot of fun, it doesn’t ask for much effort to watch, and it provides those pieces of lore which can make the genre engaging for immediate and repeated viewing.
Let us know in the comments what you think of The Abaddon Hotel!
The Spac Hole 