I don't remember a lot about my 2016 viewing of the original "The Barn" in terms of content, but I do vividly recall having a good time and admiring what writer/director Justin M. Seaman accomplished without much of a budget but with plenty of enthusiasm & dedication for the splatter genre!
Seven years later, the sequel still looks (deliberately?) cheap and amateurish, while the tongue-in-cheek laughs and crazy make-up effects even got more extreme. Moreover, and this is always a good sign, famous names from the B-movie industry are apparently standing in line to play a small role or make a cameo appearance. Not many young and aspiring horror directors are able to say their film stars Doug Bradley, Linnea Quigley, Lloyd Kaufman, and Joe Bob Briggs. Like its predecessor, "The Barn part II" is a pleasantly deranged and outrageously gore. The ideal "Halloween" treat.
The year is 1992, and Halloween celebrations are still banned in the small town of Helen's Valley, following the bloody massacre three years earlier. The local girls' sorority Gamma Tau Psi organizes a secret Halloween event as a fundraiser, though, and can you guess where? In the exact same barn where bloodthirsty demons and creatures crawled out of the old mining well in 1989 already!
There isn't much else to write about "The Barn Part II", except that it's a deliciously entertaining throwback to old-fashioned low-budgeted splatter horror from the 1980s. It's a non-stop spitfire of extreme (but fantastic) handmade DIY gore effects, tasteless humor, and gratuitous nudity provided by girls that are way too old to be in a sorority! The Boogeyman miner, Hallowed Jack-o-Lantern and Candycorn Scarecrow make their glorious comeback, and this time there are also an admirably grim Black Crow monster and a man-sized squealing pig. The mayhem and slaughter they unleash together is unspeakable. Horror icon Linnea Quigley stars as an old hag who hates Halloween, Doug Bradley gets to say stuff like "Raise some Hell" with an evil grin on his face, and Diana Prince still plays a seductive sorority girl even though she's a 45-year-old retired porn actress. If you have a heart for horror, you cannot dislike this film; - it's as simple as that.
