Welcome back to 10 Weeks of Spooktober: 2 Spook 2 Tober. Yes, it’s the second year of Spooktober, and we’re finally getting that crossover blog post you’ve all been hungering for. What am I talking about? Well, last year, I did a series called 12 Days of Christmas movies, and I rated a Christmas/horror film called Pooka! using my patented (not really) Christmas moving rating scale. Spoiler: Pooka! rated really high as a Christmas movie. Who knew?
Now, I’m reviewing the sequel Pooka Lives! for this blog series. For the second film in the Pooka! universe (or the Pooka-verse), all the Christmas spirit is gone. This is a straight up horror movie. But is it any good? And what happens when you take the Christmas out of Pooka?
Well.
Let me get this out of the way first. For more reasons than just the lack of Christmas, this Pooka! sequel is a very different movie. The first movie was psychological horror that mostly dealt with the life, hopes and dreams, and the inner workings of one troubled man in a Pooka suit. Pooka Lives! is not this at all.
We start in a similar enough place, with one man who has hit rock bottom and is trying to rebuild his career with the help of a Pooka-related job. Writer Derrick (played by Malcolm Barrett) is forced to leave New York and go back to his hometown after his book pisses off a YouTube celebrity. Now all people on the Internet are out to get him and… maybe even stalking him? Anyway, he gets a job doing copywriting for the Pooka! toy, which I guess originated in his small town.
As you can see, it’s going to go really well for him.
Then one night while eating way too many pot brownies with a group of his old friends from high school (including my girl from The Guild Felicia Day), Derrick decides it’s payback time. And what better way to get back at dumb people on the Internet than to make a weird viral challenge?
So with the help of his friends, Derrick taps into the story of Pooka’s creator’s death to make a creepy Pooka challenge. You see, the creator of Pooka killed her husband and then burned herself alive… and yet somehow the house where she did this is still fully intact and no one has so much as cleaned the blood stains off of her floor. Don’t think about it too much.
The challenge is simple. You eat ash, you sing the Pooka song, you dance around, and then you wait for Pooka to judge whether you’ve been good or bad. Does it make any sense? No. But it’s mostly just a ploy to get dumb people on the internet to eat ashes and make fools of themselves.
But then… the challenge becomes extremely popular… and people start dying.
I’m sure defenders of this movie will want to argue that Pooka Lives! is a commentary on Internet culture and the dangers of social media or something. Which is fine. But really? If you loved the first Pooka! movie, don’t expect to get the same kind of quality in this sequel. Then again, if you hated Pooka! maybe this bad boy is going to be more your speed. My point is that these are VERY DIFFERENT MOVIES. You get me?
Ultimately, Pooka Lives! is a monster movie, and a silly one at that. Did I have fun watching it? Sure, in the moments when I was able to turn off my critical brain and just let the dumbness that was this movie wash over me, I had fun. But am I going to lie and say it’s a good movie? Absolutely not.
As the movie continues, the trajectory gets more and more nonsensical. It seems like the ending is setting up for a potential third movie for the Pookaverse, but like… why? This second movie is already such a departure from the spirit of the first movie that it’s hard to imagine what a third movie would even look like.
And like… I feel like I’ve asked this before, but why is anyone buying these toys? They’re creepy AF.
If you want to check out Pooka Lives! for yourself, it’s part of Hulu’s Into the Dark series, so you can check it out on Hulu.
See you next week for more spooks.