
Jack in the Box Rises retrieves where The Jack in the Box and The Jack in the Box Awakening left off and tells the story of a toy belonging to a cursed child. This time, Jack is back, and this time he decides to hang out at a girl’s boarding school.
Speaking of movers, let’s start with our 3 fleshers who are looking for Harvey`s heart. Harvey is portrayed by Derek Nelson also seen in The Manson Family Massacre and Gods of the Deep. In turn, they encounter The Dollmaker played by James Reynard who slaughters two of them. With some elements like desk lamp borders, Raven (Isabella Colby Browne) manages to escape and run away to safety completely missing her objectives.
This is problematic because the artifact holders have taken captive Raven’s father in order to get her to use the speed tools, which Harvey is keeping. This time however he wants to take a risk and fully commit to finding out why that particular dollor is kept in a box in a school which used to be a mansion. A school which as it looks, Harvey is going to try and persuade her to apply to.
It was logical considering that both Lawrence Fowler, who directed the last two films and managed to do these solo with Lawrence in writing The Ghost Within, were dead comfortably placing themselves in the apparent quite boring and clichéd. It is noted how Raven clutches her mobile phone throughout the film, and even when the speaker, headmistress Hinch (Lisa Antrobus), states that she should not use her mobile phone, amuses me how she responds to Raven reassuring her that it’s not the way the school should be represented because ‘In prison, you can have visitors’ when the doors are closed, perhaps this was meant for people who would later be cast for the show.
I won’t say though that I liked The Jack in the Box Rises, which I consider the weakest in the series, not only does it have poor pacing, but it also has low production quality, is engulfed in aggravation, and features some mundane and uninteresting kills, mixed with awkward scenes of Raven the troublemaker trying to track down Jack who surprise, surprise chose to camouflage in a darkened building instead of performing schoolyard antics where Olivia the main bully (Leona Clarke, Summoning Bloody Mary 2, The Deadly Swarm) reigns supreme.
Once it’s located up, things start to pick up, and when it’s finally available, The Jack in the Box Rises absolutely rips off its name. Nicholas Anscombe (Crocodile Swarm, Edge of Extinction) starts to stalk Jack in the school corridors. This time though, aside from Jack, the atmosphere is not leftover from the previous sequel.
Harvey leaves Raven’s understanding of Jack in the Box quite vague, so those who have not seen the other films are not entirely lost or puzzled. For them the movie will be new so they will be clearly the ones with the most to gain from watching this film. And that is the problem I had with it, it’s not a very good movie, it is just very much a deja-vu experience. Maybe if The Fowlers had fleshed out the dull school idea in the context of The Jack in the Box Rises it would have been scored higher. Sadly, they don’t do much other than throw in some reform school tropes to try and add some kind of tension amongst the very basic and flat characters posing as characters.
Well, considering these are not Shakespearean works, I do not expect much in the way of character development. Take for instance, one of Raven’s classmates, whose character arc extends as far as to say, “My stepfather made it clear to me not to come to his house after my mother died.” The rest are worse they are merely there to die, along with all the other characters that the scriptwriters didn’t care about. Their consequences are dire, however, and we do obtain scenes portraying the effusion of blood over the bodies in a rather practical manner, unlike those depicting the appearance of a demon during a lunar eclipse.
For franchise enthusiasts, The Jack in the Box Rises is probably the most forgettable sequel out there, so consider yourself warned as it can be quite an embarrassing experience. For those who have never experienced Jack, it wouldn’t be a complete waste of time. However, if the fourth film fails to impress, then it is time to lock Jack back in the box with him never to be released.
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