Dead in 3 Days 2 (2008)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

I'll tell you why so serious

Excellent adaptation.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

"In 3 Tagen bist du tot 2" is an Austrian German-language movie from 8 years ago. The writer and director is again Andreas Prochaska and this movie here follows the story of Nina (played by Sabrina Reiter) after surviving the killer from the first film from 2 years earlier. Well.. what can I say? This film is the perfect example of what a sequel should not look like. I cannot blame them for not including most of the people from the first film as they were all dead. But I can blame them for making a film that has hardly any connection to the first apart from several references to the final shot at the hospital from the first film. This is not enough though. Not even close.Apart from that the film goes constantly for close-up shots, loud screaming and lots of violence too. I would be fairly fine with that if the story required it, but the story is barely existent here. This film is just a collection of scary moments one after the other and at the latest halfway into this film you forget there even is a story. The characters are entirely forgettable. This film is really just a despicable attempt of cashing in with the apparently pretty successful first film and still milk some more money from it. If I had not watched the first film right before and if the title had been different, this could have been very well a movie that stands on its own. At least in theory as in terms of story and characters it needs crutches to do something remotely close of standing.And what makes this even worse is that the film runs for over 110 minutes, considerably longer than the first. But the material just is not there. This was a very uninteresting and boring watch from start to finish. I am baffled by this film having a higher rating than the first. I am not a great fan of the first either, but it was way superior to this one here. At least the first has 2 or 3 pretty decent moments and a story that is not too uninteresting for the most part. This sequel here has none of the above. At least Prochaska stepped up his game considerably in recent years as "Dead in 3 Days 2" is a complete failure. Not recommended.

A rare case of the sequel surpassing the original.Admittedly - in this case this was not too hard. "In 3 Tagen bist du tot" was a formulaic teenie slasher that only genre fans will find entertaining. Part 2 however is a completely different animal. It is not a rehash of the same plot. Part 1 merely provides the back story for part 2 to unfold a gripping suspense thriller.It's not Shakespeare, mind you. The story is not exactly intellectual and you still have all the classic horror shock effects and lots and lots of gore. On the other hand the setting is so down-to-earth that it becomes almost believable at times.The final half hour is what transforms this movie from "good sequel" to "really good movie". A horror movie usually makes you guess who the bad guy is. This one makes you doubt who the good guy is. Terrific! If you liked part 1, then definitely check out this one. If you did not like part 1, still check out this one. The only excuse I'll accept is that you don't like horror at all.

I haven't seen the first part of this movie which I guess is glanced upon in the back story of the main character Nina here. Anyway, there is nothing that closely connects the plot to the title because no one dies in 3 days except for the viewer to whom the movie feels to drag on for that eternity."Dead in 3 days Part 2" is a real bad case of lazy story telling. Main character Nina was in some psycho-killer action which got most of her friends killed (I guess thats part 1 right there). Now that the killer was found dead she is haunted by visions of her friend Mona who suffered through the experience with her. We never really know why Nina decides to go look for her friend Mona except for some random lame ghost flashbacks and imaginary cellphone calls but she leaves home to look for Mona just to stumble into her strange family who happen to be a bunch of psychotics themselves.Now if that is not stupid enough she meets the girl who helps the psychos right on the bus to Monas hometown and then stumbles into her again to be invited for a sleepover with more random flashbacks. We never learn why she has blood on her hands when she awakes just as we never learn why the suddenly appearing cop (whos sole purpose is saving Nina from being shot or freezing to death although he was either captured or beaten senseless minutes before) seems so fond of following her from Vienna up to some damned mountain town. Up to here the movie seemed endless already because the storytelling is unbelievably slow and random. Since the movie is even 110minutes long that was just half of it because now Nina walks up to the mountain house of the psychos on her own (although being warned by the sleepover girl and blood on the floor of Monas house) to end up in a messed up family covering up for their sexual pervert son who seems to have killed some girls.Spoiler Alert.... little Nina takes them out one after another since most of them are obviously idiots who seem to be asking for it. There is some rough head bashing and neck stabbing with a lot of nothing happening in between and when everybody's dead not only sleepover girl crashes into a deer and dies but also an incredibly stupid twist reveals that Mona was dead from the beginning. Its a joke that someone made this random script into a movie and then even decided on stretching the non existent plot to 110 painfully slow minutes. While technically the movie was OK I felt that several effect scenes with subjective steady cams and long crane shots felt totally out of place and like they did it just for the fun of it. Total waste of time and money!

...in that sequels are always a little worse than their predecessors. "In 3 Tagen bist du tot 2" is a desperate attempt to repeat the success of part 1 by cashing in on the title. Other than a few characters returning, this movie has nothing to do with the story that it is supposedly continuing (the most glaring omission being the fact that no one in this movie ever gets a text message saying that the receiver of the message will die within the following three days).Fair enough. If they got an interesting story to tell, why not use an already popular name to sell it, right? The problem is that the story isn't very interesting at all. The first half of the movie is extremely tedious, the second one is filled with clichés. There are hardly any surprises at all. How many more times are we supposed to jump at the old trick where something terrible appears in the mirror from one shot to the next? How often do we need to see a steadicam-around-the-waist-shot à la Aronofsky?On the plus side, though, director Andreas Prochaska does get a few things right again. The cinematography is beautiful and Prochaska really knows how to elaborate on the creepiness of old cottages in the mountains, right down to the harsh sociability of a meal of speck and Schnaps or some old soccer stickers on the wall. As he did in part 1, Prochaska presents the Austrian countryside as a place where horrible crimes could take place (made all the more believable by current events such as the abduction and abuse of Natascha Kampusch or the Fritzl family).In the end, "In 3 Tagen bis du tot 2" may not be the most memorable horror movie, but it is another honorable effort at putting Austria on the horror-map. If it helps to create an interest in the genre among Austrian movie financiers, I'm all for it.