Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel

Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel (2018)

Runtime: 89 minutes

Directed by: Stephen Cognetti

Starring: Vasile Flutur, Jillian Geurts, Joy Shatz, Dustin Austen, Kyle Ingleman

From: Cognetti Films

The announcement made yesterday that there will be a third installment in this series AND a limited series called The Abaddon Tapes meant that it was the perfect time for me to see II. This past fall I viewed the first film; it was a found footage deal where a group that does haunted houses each year purchases an abandoned hotel and things go wrong as many mysterious events happens and opening night is a literal horrorshow. That was a good movie, especially by found footage standards. This sequel, though... not so much.

Ostensibly it's about an investigative team receiving a lead about the hotel and asking the lone survivor from the first movie to break into the place and lead them around to try and uncover evidence, yet there are also other things present that I say are there to kill time as otherwise this would not have been an hour and a half in length. This includes other people breaking in and filming their adventures (making laughable the claim that local police frequently drive by the place to prevent other people from breaking in) and a local talk show called “Morning Mysteries.” To me, a big problem is that there is more than just found footage and that is not to the movie's benefit.

Neither is this being told in a nonlinear fashion, jumping back and forth often. To echo a common refrain, the main accomplishment of this decision: destroying any tension that may have been building up. The new characters aren't as enjoyable or interesting as the ones in the OG movie and wow is there some astoundingly bad acting here. I really hope some people were told to act wooden on purpose for the sake of the character, which is a questionable choice but is better than the alternative of them hiring people that bad and thinking their performances were adequate.


It is a shame as at least there is a phony paranormal psychic character who was amusing and the film does have the same sort of scares as in the first. Some fans may in fact get the same amount of entertainment out of this as in Hell House LLC; to me, this just wasn't as good and the story was not as captivating.