If you loved the The Houses October Built but felt irked that it made attempts at a plot and characters, well, here you go. This sequel ”found footage” film, also directed by Bobby Roe, is essentially the same story as the 2014 original: Four unmemorable dudes and their inexplicably tolerant woman friend take a cross-country trip to discover escape rooms, haunted houses, an undead pub crawl, and so on. A mysterious blue-masked figure stalks them, but that doesn’t become relevant until an hour in. The Houses October Built 2 is less interesting as a thriller than as a semi-documentary on the real Halloween attractions its characters explore, from a brain-eating contest with the celebrity Kobayashi to an elaborate “zombie run.”

We glimpse how haunted houses decontextualize and fetishize mutilation, torture, and degradation while betraying grotesque ideas about sexuality (sometimes through abusive speech and behavior toward visitors) or even unease about politics (one haunted house warns that an anti-zombie vaccine is not covered under Obamacare). The filmmakers don’t, however, seem intrigued with these observations. They interminably record not only the ”hauntings,” but their purchases of souvenir t-shirts afterwards. At least they feature one fine piece of advice, from a queer actor at an “extreme” park: “Don’t lick anything that gets on your face.”

See Movie Times for more information about what Obamacare covers in this horror movie.