Spoilers for the first Teke Teke film here; in the original parent story, we see a typical urban legend horror film that's based around finding out what is going on and how to stop it and can it even be stopped. It's quite a cliche for an urban legend horror film and as much as I didn't enjoy it (I gave the original film 4.0/10), it still made me laugh and have one or two tense moments and jump scares.
I did not want to watch the second film, I only did because leaving a film or drama series unfinished irks my OCD. This was more of a chore for me so maybe I liked it a lot less because I already went into it expecting nothing - but even then I still came out disappointed.
Teketeke 2 is set as a sequel directly onwards from the original Teke Teke film and that is exactly where this film makes its first mistake. This film is only an hour and twelve minutes long, there isn't much time to fit everything in without it being rushed - so they decided that the first 5 minutes of this second film would be a recap of the first. This cut down the film time for the second movie to an hour and 7 minutes.
You would think that this film would be rushed with an overall run time of 67 minutes to fit an entire film into, but, you'd be wrong. The first quarter of this film is so slowly dragged out that I ended up pausing and drinking numerous coffees to keep myself awake watching it. There is so much that is unnecessary for many scenes to include in this for the ultimate movement of the film, that cutting out what isn't necessary at all would bring the film down to maybe 55 minutes in actual length. There is so much you can actually skip when watching this, it is eye-rolling.
After the first quarter of the film, things - thankfully - begin to speed up... and then things just start getting way too rushed. Instead of levelling it out, the directors instead slowed it down as much as possible and then just threw everything in at once instead of cutting out unnecessities and adding in necessities in more detail. You would think after what comes across as quite a rookie director mistake that it would get better but... it doesn't.
The special effects in this are even worse than in the first film. The blood is unbelievably fake that they are using for these death scenes that I think if I had been able to care what was going on, I would have laughed so loudly it would have hurt. Thankfully, the CGI is a little better than the original film (if you haven't seen the ridiculous and infamous Teke Teke jump gif, you're missing out) but it's still not enough to even try and save this film. The good CGI was an attempt to defibrillate someone who's been dead for six years and unburied from their coffin; they literally just tried to give CPR to a skeleton and called it a day.
If the too slow, then way too rushed ridiculous blood spraying wasn't enough to thoroughly ruin any enjoyment I could have gotten from this film, then they turned it into the Ultime Cliche. Ultimate Cliche x Ultimate Cliche. Not only do they still follow some of the (more unliked) cliches of urban legends films, this becomes an over the top Asian high school kids bullying revenge royale. They have managed to take unliked tropes from urban legends and include some of the most well-liked cliches from high school horror films - probably in an attempt to save some of the film with well-liked tropes - and somehow managed to make tropes that don't get old fall flat on their face ridiculously hard.
This entire film was a mess from start to finish.
And I'm sad; Teke-teke was an urban legend that I discovered when I was quite young. It used to give me nightmares and make me wake up chilled and pulsing with adrenaline. It used to haunt me under the covers and whenever I had to walk home at night alone. The film series was always so enticing to me because I wanted to be scared, I wanted it to spark back those childlike feelings of paranoia and terror.
Unfortunately, the overactive imagination of an eleven-year-old built a better plot in a nightmare than a director could do for a renowned film.
Definitely just skip this film; the first film can get away with a lot of stuff if you let it but the second one doesn't have a chance to hide from a lot of its injustices. Skip this series and watch a different urban legend film; you'll thank me for it in the future when you stumble across this on late night television and realise you were going to watch it long again.
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