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The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death | 2015 | PG-13 | - 1.5.1
As German planes drop bombs on WWII London, a primary teacher (Phoebe Fox) helps evacuate eight children to alleged safety in the English countryside. However, the teachers find a dark, unfriendly old mansion and the children begin to act oddly. Also with Helen McCrory, Leanne Best, Jeremy Irvine, Adrian Rawlins and Ned Dennehy. Directed by Tom Harper. [1:38]
SEX/NUDITY 1 - A man and a woman smile, while she giggles as they talk. A man and a woman embrace briefly in fear during a storm and she later kisses him briefly.
► A woman wears a long sleeveless nightgown that reveals partial outlines of her nipples, but no cleavage.
VIOLENCE/GORE 5 - A pre-teen girl stuffs red material into a gas mask that she puts on, turns to a dark corner and faces zombie children with white, black-lined faces next to a pale man with glazed, milky eyes: the girl falls dead and her bulging milky eyes are seen open and staring through the gas mask lenses. An older boy wears a gas mask and from the view of a small boy in a dormitory cot, we see the first boy's masked face jump toward the young one with a snarl; the young boy stares and covers his head with a thin quilt and in a few minutes we see a black draped woman appear in a corner of the dorm room, glide through a quilt over the older boy's cot, bring her vampire-like face close to the camera as an older boy rises and walks into the marsh; a woman finds him lying dead in the marsh with blood on one pajama leg the next morning and cries, shouting for help.
► A woman dashes into an old house and removes the covers from a body in a cot revealing a small boy with a bloated and scratched face, dead and with staring eyes; when she looks beneath the cot, a claw-like hand touches her shoulder and disappears, and the woman then hallucinates, seeing a dead little girl standing up, an old man telling her to "Shhh," and an empty cradle beneath a sparking spotlight; a door creaks, lights flash, and loud thumping resounds upstairs. In a toy room an empty rocking chair rocks then stops as a door slams shut when the woman enters, a thick noose appears hanging from the ceiling (imminent suicide implied) as she hears a raspy, "You let him die" and through a window the woman sees a dead boy standing in deep water causing her to scream and stamp through the floor, falling into the room below (unharmed but shaken); she runs from the house, jumps into the water and shouts "Wake up!" (the boy appears to be in a trance) as human hands pull her and the boy down from below, but she escapes and holds the boy; a man jumps in and pushes them to the surface as the hands pull him down to the bottom, presumably dead.
► In several flashback scenes a woman walks through a hospital ward and sees a doctor's hands as he wipes blood off them with white gauze strips and deposits them into a metal pan; in a curtained bed area, we see a woman wearing a gown extending to her lower shins while sitting up and we see a large bloody stain between her knees, indicating childbirth, as she sobs, begging for her infant son to be returned as a nurse walks away with the baby and in one flashback, the nurses' face flashes into a white snarling zombie face that roars into the camera.
► A decoy airplane field with fake British warplanes made of wood struts and cloth stands in an isolated area beside a bunker where a pilot brings two women and six children to hide from Nazi aircraft and from a ghostly woman set on murdering the children; in the bunker we hear screeching and roaring and then see Nazi planes fly over an old house and the airfield as the children and adults stand in a circle, hands joined and eyes closed while praying a chant for safety from ghosts; light bulbs burst and a console activates, launching fire bombs outside, where we see smoke and large flashes of fire before a figure covered in a black shroud appears beside the circle of people with its face blue-gray beneath a veil, streaked with blood and eyes large and glassy black (a girl looks at it and screams and a woman screams and passes out); a small boy vanishes and the faces of a boy and a woman are scratched and red with a little blood on their cheeks.
► In three close-up jump scenes we see a ghost woman's face like a white vampire mask with black wrinkles, glowing eyes, long dirty fangs and stringy gray hair; we see blackish-blue claw like hands with sharp yellowed nails and in one scene, one of her hands sticks out through a hole in a ceiling while in another scene, she crawls out of the hole and along the ceiling briefly, before disappearing with a screech and a small boy disappears from a cot in the room.
► A woman in a bus in the countryside asks that the headlights be turned on at night, but the driver angrily says that this is still wartime and blackouts are mandatory; the woman, another woman and eight children are tense and distraught, remembering recent deaths of loved ones and fearing for their lives as the bus breaks down with a loudly popping flat tire near a demolished house; one of the women walks past a dirty window, peeks in and yelps as a glassy-eyed man's face appears inside the window and he punches through the window toward her, shattering the glass (no blood or injuries are seen) and the woman yells and runs back to the bus. A woman awakens at night and hears thumping, she gets up and follows the noise into a house where she enters a dark playroom littered with old toys, picks at the blackout screening at one window and passes through into a fuzzy dream world of a hospital sequence around 1910; we see eight old iron beds covered with debris and hear a woman crying to bring her baby back as a nurse walks away with the newborn completely covered in a blanket (the first woman wakes up in bed with a start).
► A pre-teen girl follows a trail of red yarn strung through a house and ends at a folding screen in a room as a man's voice whispers, "You let him die"; she appears to go into a trance as she wraps the red yarn tightly around her throat until blood dribbles from her nose and a woman rushes in, surprising the girl out of the trance and pulls off the yarn.
► A woman finds an old key and discovers that it fits a small tumbledown stone house near her place; she lights a candle to explore it and finds dusty boxes of photos and old letters as a door slams and locks itself and a pale man with glazed eyes appears and grabs her by the throat, choking hard as she gasps, coughs and falls back, finally able to escape the house. A male hand rises from the interior of a cradle and strangles a screaming woman, who falls away, chokes and recovers. In three scenes, an empty rocking chair loudly rocks and stops as a woman enters the room.
► A woman awakens at night to thumping noises and walks with a lantern into a damp basement, where she finds a rocking chair rocking on its own while red capital letters appear on a wall stating, "You let him die." A mute little boy hands a woman a note that makes the statement, "You let him die." A woman hears a raspy voice speak the phrase, "You let him die."
► A figure, gender indeterminate, hangs in a corner of a toy room with feet barely touching the floor and dark shrouds covering the face and body to the ankles; from the viewpoint of this figure, we move closer to a small boy at the room's door as he looks progressively more frightened, eyes wide and lips trembling; the door slams and locks itself, a woman pounds on it, it opens and she enters to find the child sitting on the floor, facing a blank wall with his eyes looking glazed and having vertical slits for pupils. A figure covered in black shrouds appears and a woman shouts to it to stop as the figure runs away; the woman falls in a stand of trees and tumbles down an incline into sand, grimacing in some pain as we hear screeching and dull roaring sounds off-screen as a thunderstorm begins and the woman returns to the house under a torrent of rain, some lightning and some loud thunder. A disappeared small boy sits inside a fake cloth airplane and his shadow shows him rocking himself as a man climbs in through a slit; the boy turns and we see his face blue-gray and scratched with blood under bulging glassy eyes causing the man to shout in fear and he backs out of the plane, which explodes in large flames (the boy appears again later).
► An old, shaky female voice on a gramophone cylinder says that she confronted a ghost and that a young boy drowned in a marsh; she speaks louder, saying, "Get away. I'm imagining you. You're not real" and she screams as a man pulls the needle off the cylinder; a woman in the room looks out the window and gasps as a dark figure's head in a shroud slams against the pane from outside and disappears. In a London apartment, we see an old photograph of a military pilot and his crew as the camera pans in and we see the glass on the photo smash loudly on its own; in a reflection in the broken glass, we see the partial head and shoulders of a black shrouded figure, face white and black-streaked beneath a veil, eyes glassy black and staring.
► Women and a few children enter an abandoned mansion and we see mold, dust, severely peeling wallpaper, dirty woodwork and flooring, dark corners, cobwebs, debris and no electricity on the upper floor; a cobweb-filled room contains musty toys with large staring eyes and cracked faces, some of which are mechanical and begin to operate on their own, sending clanking noises throughout the house, accompanied by stomping of unseen feet and whispers and shrieks off camera; a tree limb and several branches have extended through a hole in a previously broken window in the toy room. An empty cradle rocks by itself in a few scenes, once under a spotlight.
► Late at night, we see an abandoned two-story mansion on an island at the end of a flooding causeway shrouded in heavy mists and surrounded by scraggly bushes and standing water. A graveyard beside a mansion features several old, eroded gravestones and statues.
► Two pre-teen boys bully a 7-year-old boy, taking a drawing from him and threatening to rip it up before a woman reprimands them and refuses to allow them dinner. Two pre-teen boys run into a woman in a hallway and she yelps, "Ouch!" before reprimanding them for recklessness. Two women argue about the existence of ghosts and later, a doctor and one of the women argue about the reality of ghosts and spirits.
► A young boy carries two pencil drawings that we hear he drew of his parents, who died in a house bombing; one of the pictures looks like a woman wearing a long black shroud, holding the hand of a small boy (the boy has been mute since the bombing).
► During the London Blitz about 50 people hide in a subway shelter and we hear muffled sounds of bombing and air raid sirens as a young girl looks scared; outside, we see a bombed street, clouds of heavy smoke and fire trucks spraying water onto crumbled buildings as a uniformed man walks on crutches with his lower leg missing at the bandaged knee (no blood is evident).
► A doctor carries the body of a boy through a hallway and we hear an older woman tell children that dangers are everywhere, not only in London where Nazis are bombing and that they all must be careful. During the end credits, the silhouette of the body of a boy in a shirt and knee-length shorts floats in a balled up position. A letter from an insane woman to her young son reveals that he drowned in a marsh surrounding their house and we see a large cross standing in the water to mark the spot of demise. A sheep is seen to be caught in a barbed wire fence and a woman sets it free, allowing it to limp away with a couple of spots of blood on its back.
► A man rides his motorcycle across a dirt causeway, stops, shudders, grimaces in fear and rides on. A man speeds across a causeway in a jeep and a woman passenger shouts for him to slow down; he stops the jeep and explains that he is afraid of water after being shot down over the sea and losing his 3-man crew to drowning.
► A young boy holds a small vintage sailor doll and a woman attempts to remove it from his grasp and throw it away twice, but it reappears, even in a different building miles away.
LANGUAGE 1 - Name-calling (coward), stereotypical references to men, women, children, war orphans, WWII pilots, doctors, teachers, ghosts, 2 religious exclamations (damn, godforsaken), 2 group prayers.
SUBSTANCE USE - A man crushes out a cigarette in an ashtray, a man takes a single puff of a cigarette with smoke rising, and a man uses his cigarette lighter for light when the electricity goes out in a house.
DISCUSSION TOPICS - War, death, danger, guilt, memories, nightmares, orphans, bullying, ghosts, revenge, murder, kidnapping, religion, sacrifice.
MESSAGE - Revenge from beyond the grave is difficult to fight against.
CAVEATS
Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.
We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.
Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.
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