Haunted House 2: Another cringe-maker

Ever wonder what it feels like to cringe for 87 minutes straight?

That's the disturbing effect brought on by Marlon Wayans' awful sequel to last year's tiresome one-joke parody, A Haunted House. It leaves viewers in actual pain.

Sure to offend anyone with a three-digit IQ, A Haunted House 2 is also one of the laziest sequels imaginable. It's pretty much the same movie as the first, but with a few new characters, more insulting jokes about race, and a scene featuring Wayans having sex with a doll.

It's hard to know what to make of Wayans, who showed some genuine talent as a physical comedian in his brother Keenen's Scary Movie franchise. It's too tiring to hate him for cowriting and coproducing this disaster, which riffs on the Paranormal Activity films, The Conjuring, The Last Exorcism, and Sinister. Mostly, one feels sorry for him.

Wayans returns as Malcolm, who spent the first film battling a demon who had possessed his girlfriend, Kisha (Essence Atkins). As the sequel opens, we learn that Kisha is still afflicted, but Malcolm has left her. (A true hero!)

Kisha may be in his rearview mirror, but the demons won't let Malcolm go. They begin attacking the beautiful house he shares with his new lady, Megan (Jaime Pressly), and her two kids, Wyatt (Steel Stebbins) and Becky (Ashley Rickards).

Wayans squeezes Malcolm and Megan's interracial relationship for one cheap ethnic slur after another, and carpet-bombs us with profanities, lewd jokes, gross body-fluid gags, and awful sex scenes.

Gabriel Iglesias (Magic Mike) wastes his talent as Malcolm's Mexican American neighbor and anti-demon helper Miguel, while Cedric the Entertainer underwhelms as an exorcist.

If it's genuine demon-possession laughs you're after, watch Ghost Team One, which recently came out on DVD. It features smart cracks about race relations - the leads all are Latino - and plenty of raunchy sex. Unlike the Haunted House films, it has a spark of real intelligence.

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