Horror Movie Review: Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel (2018)

Continuing on directly from the first instalment, we are heading back in to Hell House for another round of frights and scares with Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel.

Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel is a 2018 American found-footage horror film written and directed by Stephen Cognetti. It’s a direct sequel to the 2015 film Hell House LLC, a film that surprised me by being really good and genuinely quite scary. The Abaddon Hotel, for short, has a simple plot and one that is very common, in that following the events of the first movie, a collecion of journalists head back in to the haunted house to investigate what happened.

Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel was released on Shudder on September 20, 2018. The main cast features Vasile Flutur as Mitchell Cavanaugh, Jillian Geurts as Jessica Fox, Joy Shatz as Molly Reynolds, Dustin Austen as David Morris, Brian David Tracy as Arnold Tasselman / Andrew Tully and Kyle Ingleman as Brock Davies. We also get some of the original cast back for snippets inside The Abaddon Hotel with Danny Bellini as Alex Taylor, Lauren A. Kennedy as Melissa, Adam Schneider as Andrew McNamara and Alice Bahlke as Diane Graves making reappearances.

The Abaddon Hotel’s plot isn’t going to suprise you much. We start straight off with seeing a young man called Jackson Mallet’s story being recounted by his mother, Wendy. It appears Hell House has become the dare of choice for a few people, Jackson being one of them. He broke in, he never came back out or was heard from again, other than via messages and a self filmed video he sent his mother from inside the house where we see him get in and then break down as he runs around the hotel screaming for help. In the last shot from his phone, we catch a glimpse of one of the cult members approaching him before it cuts off.

We move forwards a bit to the main reasoning for this new film as local TV presenter, Suzy McCombs is presenting a Hell House LLC special chat show, with Arnold Tasselman, Mitchell Cavanaugh (Diane Graves’ coworker from the first film) and Brock Davies as guests. They start discussing the accuracy of the original Hell House documentary. Arnold, a represntative of the town’s leadership, points out that he tried to take down Mitchell’s documentary, arguing that it is a hoax that is causing damage to the town’s reputation, while Mitchell reiterates that Diane and her cameraman died inside the hotel, and it is not a safe place to go. Brock, on the other hand, is your mildly irritating “medium” type who has his own show and sees Hell House as being potentially lucrative.

A journalism team from an online blog also seem to think Hell House could be lucrative. They catch the program and, led by presenter, Jessica Fox, hatch a plan to convince Mitchell to join them so they can break into the Abaddon Hotel in hopes of a spike of popularity for their website. It will have to be a break in too, as Hell House is under constant watch from local police due to a spike of missing persons cases connected to the damned place.

We are also regularly shown clips of these other cases, both to fatten the film out, it seems, and to try to build up the legend of Hell House. We see video of a teenager who broke into the hotel and disappeared while livestreaming his adventure. On another video, a couple picks up a strange woman asking to be dropped off at the hotel, only to be revealed as the ghost of one of the tour-goers that died in the haunted attraction back in 2009.

Jessica Fox, who appears to lack any sort of ethics, convinces Mitchell to enter the hotel he swore to never enter by preying on his feelings of loss related to Diane. She pushes and twists him until he agrees that he should come in for closure. She is manipulative and very unlikeable. They meet with Mitchell outside the Abaddon hotel, so we now have Mitchell, Jessica, Molly (Jessica’s co host) and David (cameraman) all set to break in when our irritating medium, Brock and his cameraman, Malcom, arrive determined not to miss out.

The film also take a strange decision here to fast forward to the future, 4 days after the break in, but before we have seen the break in, to show us a distressed Jessica being interviewed by police. It kind of sets in your mind who is and who isn’t going to survive, killing a little of the suspense though Hell House do have some more twists and turns up their sleeve on the way, thankfully.

Back to the break in and Molly bottles it, instead opting to stay outside so the two teams, led by Brock on one side, and Jessica on the other, head inside. They aren’t friends, and have no plans to work together, so instantly split up with Mitchell and Jessica heading to the infamous basement while Brock heads to the dining room, the site where the original Abaddon Hotel owner, Andrew Tully and his satanic cult followers hung themselves long ago.

Brock tries to summon and communicate with Andrew Tully via a Ouija board. It doesn’t seem the best idea and they appear to bring forth the ghost of a woman, playing the piano in the dining room. She plays that little haunting melody that features in all of the Hell House movies and it does add a little extra darkness and creepy atmoshere to the movie. Molly, still outside the hotel, gets a message from David telling her to come in. She does, and when she finds David, they realise he didn’t send the message. Mitchell and Jessica continue to investigate the hotel, looking specifically for a collection of paperwork that may hold some answers and they do get some information that links back to the original Hell House story.

It seems that Alex, from the first movie, originally went to the Abaddon Hotel in April 2009, way before the Hell House disaster. We are shown him making a deal with an unseen man to bring his team to the location. So it seems planned, and not an unfortunate coincidence.

Around this time, with strange goings on afoot and them completely unaware of the perilous situation Brock and Malcolm have put themselves in to, Mitchell decides he has had enough, and they all need to get out, now. They try multiple exits but there is no way out. Either doors won’t budge or our sinister friend, the clown is blocking the way.

Cue scenes of terror and panic as the team try to escape, eventually ending up upstairs outside the room Diane was last known to have been in. They are lured in, trapped and captured waking back up in the dining room where they are bound and surrounded by cult members and Andrew Tully, amongst the hanging bodies of Brock and Malcolm. Around this time we also get another cut back to our TV presenter, Suzy, who, having just finished the interview with Brock, Mitchell and the town official, Tasselman, gets a call from Tasselman’s staff apoloigising for him not being able to make the interview. Suzy is shocked, as she has literally just interviewed him, so who was that?

As The Abaddon Hotel movie reaches it’s conclusion, Tully, acting almost like a narrator fills everyone in onhis dastardly plans leaving Mitchell with a terrible decision to make before we return to the scene of Jessica at the police station to bring us to our close.

The Abaddon Hotel is not a great movie. Hell House, the first one, is a great movie. This is a misstep and, for me, it tries it’s level best to undo all of the great work laid down in the first movie but thankfully, that movie is strong enough to withstand. In fact, it is purely down to the quality of Hell House, the creepy location, the basement, the clown and the strong acting performances of that first movie that this one even comes in at okay. If this was a film on it’s own, it would score terribly but it isn’t, it is a less interesting chapter in an already good book. I enjoyed being back in the location, I enjoyed seeing the original cast make appearances as ghosts and I even enjoyed some of the explanations and link backs that fattened out the lore.

I also occasionally wished they would not go quite as heavy on the cult stuff as Hell House was a better film overall when I thought it was just a hanuted house. Adding cults, portals and the like isn’t bad, it just isn’t as scary.

Everything about Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel is way weaker than in the original and that includes the acting. I thought Vasile Flutur was decent as Mitchell and Kyle Ingleman as Brock did a good job at being an irritating medium loon but I thought everyone else just threw it in. Jessica and Molly, in particular did not look like they cared that much and it didn’t help that they were both quite unlikeable so I was kind of okay with them getting offed.

I also didn’t love the jumping around stuff. Is it a documentary, is it found footage and, if it is, why did we get the scene where Suzy is back at the TV studio finding out Tassleman didn’t attend the interview? That was off camera and there is no logical reason for that to have been filmed. Why can it not happen chronologically too – that jumping around, showing Jess in the police station at the end before we have even entered the house didn’t make this film better in any way.

There are good points too though. This house, the location is haunting and more than scary enough to carry some of the weight on it’s own. Of course the clown is still creepy as hell and the basement is a place noone in their right mind would ever go to. The scares are still pleasingly patient and come off the back of built tension, not sudden jumps and overall, the lore of Hell House is successfully built upon here. It just could have done with a little more effort from some of the actors and a bit more streamlining to the jumpy script.

A worthy successor? No, but it is a successor to a great movie and that will do for now.