‘Smile 2’ Nicely Targets Pop Star Fame With the Terrific Naomi Scott

In an early scene in Smile 2, the fictional pop superstar Skye Riley is in her drug dealer’s apartment. “Do you believe in weird stuff?” he asks her, between doing lines of coke.

You certainly will after this horror romp — writer-director Parker Finn’s second movie that suddenly opens up the franchise with the promises of multiple directions in the future. Not for that drug dealer, though: He soon smiles at her demonically as he repeatedly slams a 35-pound gym weight into his head, making it hamburger.

Smile 2 lands as unsettling grins are plastered on pumpkins and politicians alike as we approach Halloween and Election Day, and the psychotic, overly made-up leads of Joker: Folie à Deux have been putting up a brave face at their terrible box-office numbers.

So it’s the perfect time for a sequel to 2020’s Smile, which bridged the gap between elevated art horror and straight-out, unapologetic slasher. Finn this time takes on fame, a better tonal fit than the generational trauma of the first. It’s a meditation on breakdowns in the public eye, with a side dish of body horror.

We start six days after the last movie but they are barely connected — a single character for a few minutes — as we watch a demon that forces its victims to smile before meeting a gruesome end working its way into the low-level drug game.

Finn has become a much more assured filmmaker and uses humor so well here, from nasty gangsters enjoying pumpkin Frappuccinos to our heroine Googling “Does vomit have DNA?” He’s still fond of jump-scares and blood spurting and gross-out tricks, like a body dragged by a truck until it’s just a smear with entrails. One delightful moment has Skye chased by demonic backup dancers, a Bob Fosse-meets-Thriller sequence.

Finn also has a ball putting his heroines into cringe-worthy situations. In the first movie, a murdered cat got bundled into a kid’s birthday present. In this one, it’s an impromptu speech in front of music industry types that goes horrifically off the rails. He’s got a deeper target: How do we quiet those voices in our heads that say we’re no good?

Finn’s script sometime lags as he searches for an ending for Smile 2, seemingly in two minds, before basically delivering both, kicking up dream sequences and alternate timelines like a squid pumping out ink to cover its tracks. Over two hours ends up being too long.

But he has found a great satirical target, given life to a third film easily and showcased another rising star to watch. That’s a reason to, well, smile about.

‘Smile 2’ is out nationwide on Oct. 18, 2024.