Into The Dark: Pooka 2: Pooka Lives! (2020) Review (Written By Josh Staats)

Pooka Lives is a 2020 horror movie on Hulu Starring Malcolm Barrett, Lyndie Greenwood, Felicia Day, and Jonah Ray, just to name a few. The Director is a fairly new and up-comer named Alejandro Brugues. Most notably doing Juan of the Dead, two episodes of From Dusk Till Dawn: the Series, and doing the E segment of ABC’s of Death 2. 

Since this is a sequel I will do a quick recap of the original Pooka and how I felt about it. Pooka is a doll that was made for children, it has happy and sad emotions built in that randomly go off, and it goes awry, with murder spree. It wasn’t perfect, but it was bit funny, had a decent story, and could have been a single movie, or a series, which the latter it seems to be doing. I rate it a 3/5. worth a watch, worth telling your friends about, and worth making your friends watch, but don’t expect everyone to be super stoked about it if oddball, cheesy, and yet doesn’t feel that it was produced poorly. Anyway, on with the main attraction. 

Pooka Lives starts off wrong, what I mean by this is the first movie sets up for the most part how Pooka was created. This movie throws that mostly out the window (although later in the movie, they reference the first movie happened) for its own story of a woman going mad with love for her Pooka Invention, and lighting herself on fire, after murdering her uncaring husband. 

Cue setup, and a high end socialite writer, has bitten off more than he can chew in the social media realm, and has been laughed back to his hometown. He stays with some friends, tries to rekindle old relationships, and his town is the manufacturing center for, I hope you guessed it, Pooka! 

Lots of story is here, and some setup for things getting scared, but it drags on until it about half way through the movie. While this may not matter when the movie is a great pull off or the story is super compelling, this film doesn’t hit either of those marks, and I am sad for that, as I find pook creepy enough, just that’s it really. Just creepy. 

One of the great things the movie does, is Pooka becomes a living creepypasta, and as people on faux Reddit, Facebook and 4chan, Pooka mutates to the most evil, vile, and German thing possible. Pooka turns from a odd, and creepy teddy bear, to a big sleek evil demon thing almost out of the video game Doom. 

All in all, the movie was just okay, I think the costumes design was good, but sadly the story was at the very least filled with holes, and worst was incredibly incompetent, not well read over, and could of used another draft. Acting was fine, everyone carried their own in the film. Dialogue was fun, but a few already old, tongue in cheek little one liners that make it into discussion between the characters. If you watched the original, I guess watch this one, but it almost isn’t a sequel which is frustrating because I had hopes that this might be a good new horror series to follow along, yet I feel it falling flat already. 

Pooka 2 gets a 2/5!

Josh Staats out!