There are just about enough hand-over-mouth moments to please thrill-seekers in this B-movie follow-up but eyerolls soon prevail
There was plenty of silliness but also plenty of suspense in 2022’s modestly successful don’t-look-down thriller Fall, a surprisingly well-made micro-budget marvel that ultimately found its audience on Netflix. While certain elements, such as the no-name leads and increasingly hokey script, might have made it seem like yet another churned out low-rent original for the streamer, it boasted more genuine thrills than we’ve come to expect there or really anywhere during this quantity over quality time for genre movies.
A sequel was financially inevitable (the original cost just $3m) but narratively questionable, given that the self-contained survival tale did not lend itself to the elasticity of a franchise. So here we are with Fall 2: Deadpoint, a palm-sweating formula regurgitated with only moderately jolting results. The first film saw two young women trying to get over the loss of a loved one by, naturally, climbing up an abandoned TV tower. So now the sequel has two young women trying to get over the loss of a loved one (who died in the first film) by, naturally, attempting a sky-high plank walk on the side of a mountain in Thailand. History then repeats itself when chaos strikes, this time courtesy of a rockslide, and our heroines have something more than grief to worry about.
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