User Reviews

I haven't seen Gonger 1, but this one seems to pick up where the first one left off. A girl wakes up in the middle of the night, hears some sounds, she thinks it may be one Philipp, she runs to greet him only to see a creepy boy, she then falls over a railing and dies.

We then meet Phillip in India. He has the urgency to return to Germany. He borrows a box from a guru, who tells him that in order to solve the problem he will have to die himself.

Once in Germany, Phillip arrives just in time for funeral services in church for the dead girl but he nearly gets kicked out of church. The attendees hold him responsible. When the girl's friend approach him he tells them off and goes to some house that looks like a mixture of a castle, convent, and mansion. The girl's friends arrive there and tell him that they want to help him solve the mystery of the girl's death. The friends are a pretty blonde, 2 guys who serve no purpose, a rocker chick, and a tech geek.

The tech geek sets up all sorts of machine to capture the bad influence. In the meantime people start having dreams and visions with the creepy boy. The boy sets up wicked traps to harm people. But every time something is about to happen someone intervenes.

They set up some device so that Philipp can kill the boy or something of the sort. And at first it looks like it succeeds. They all start partying afterward. But the boy is suddenly back and it's in the last 15 minutes that this movie picks up the pace and tries to explain what goes on.

The production is first rate, the acting OK. There is no attempt to make any of the characters interesting, not even the lead, Philipp. The pretty blonde is, well, very pretty. The rocker chick doesn't get to do anything really. While there is some sense of dread, nothing really happens. The first real death happens 13 minutes before the movie ends. I'm not fond of movies that don't make any effort to be entertaining for hours and then try to cram as much story in the last few minutes. And for a while the explanation is interesting and makes sense. Until the very end when we get some expected twists that really don't make a whole lot of sense.

"Gonger II" is a German 1.5-hour film from 2010 and as the title already says it is the sequel to the original film from 2008. The latter was already fairly weak, but this one here is even worse. Director Theede did not return, so Philipp Osthus, a relatively experienced television filmmaker took over for this small screen sequel we got here. The writers returned and this made clear that you could not expect quality in here. I am still surprised how badly it turned out. Several actors returned, such as Sebastian Ströbel playing the main character. But the writing is really bad overall and some of the actors manage the impossible of letting an already horrible script look even worse with their hopeless line delivery. They shouldn't even be called actors to be honest. This film is also known as "Gonger - Das Böse schläft nie" or "Gonger 2 - Das Böse kehrt zurück" and evil did indeed return in terms of filmmaking quality. Some famous horror film references alone just won't be sufficient anymore if everything else is garbage. The ending looked a bit as if they had a third film in mind, but luckily it never happened. The most disappointing thing is that, even with 3 hours time (90 minutes here, 90 minutes in the first) they never managed to elaborate convincingly on the Gonger phenomenon or explain it satisfyingly. Until the very end I was still tempted to give this one 2 stars out of 5, but I just can't with how much worse this is than the already pretty bad first film. The only reason why I cannot say the series should have ended after the first film is because I think it never should have been launched in the beginning. Huge thumbs-down for this one here, absolutely not recommended. It's not scary, not thrilling, not entertaining. Nothing.