'Ready' for more laughs than gasps?

The horror-comedy slasher sequel wages class warfare that never quite hits mark.

- AMY NICHOLSON FILM CRITIC

Searchlight Pictures

KATHRYN NEWTON, left, and Samara Weaving play sisters facing high stakes in the slasher sequel.

Scream queen Samara Weaving has an extraordinary yell: shrill, feral and ferocious, like a mongoose before it goes on the attack.

Its vibrato fury bursts out only when she’s fighting for her life. Otherwise, her newly wed (and newly widowed) Grace MacCaullay stays quiet when being hunted, hence surviving a killer game of hide-and-go-seek in Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s 2019 hit “Ready or Not,” only to be forced to play again in their echoey sequel “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.”

In the tradition of “Halloween II,” this one picks up the very second the last one ended. Grace, her white lace dress blackened with blood, is smoking a cigarette outside of an incinerated mansion that belongs to her in-laws, the Le Domas, who are all dead. On this bride’s wedding night, her groom permitted his relatives to sacrifice her to a demon, believing the lore that a wicked spirit named Le Bail gave the family its staggering fortune. They failed; she triumphed.

The first film teased the idea that the family might be superstitious crackpots only to merrily reveal at the climax that the devil is actually real— and that, when disappointed, he makes his minions explode like a shaken bottle of Dom Pérignon.

That gag no longer comes as a total shock, but returning screenwriters Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy find that the suspense of who is going to pop, and when and why, works just as well. “It’s always surprising,” Grace says with grim humor. (Between this and “Sirat,” human combustion is the morbid punchline of the year.)