The McKinney Family Home Videos Vol 2 (2025) Review

Plot

Another tape is uncovered documenting the inner workings of The Church of the Holy Mother, it’s leader Diana, and their God head Lilith.

Good Points

• It is properly weird – Which is a compliment because some of the footage is just plain unpleasant to look at.
  
  
• The VHS stuff is good – The battered picture and horrible-looking footage are doing a lot of the work here, but it also doesn’t feel like the filmmakers have just slapped a VHS filter over a normal horror movie and called it a day, because the whole thing is built around that look and is presented well.
  
  
• The sound is horrible, in a good way – there are some moments where the audio is almost as uncomfortable as what is happening on screen, and a few other people I know who liked the film mentioned the soundtrack and audio, and I get it.
  
  
• The Church of the Holy Mother – This isn’t just another collection of creepy VHS clips with no bigger idea behind them either, nor is it lazy, so for fans of the series, it has a lot to like.
  
  
• It is more interesting when it gets into the mythology – Thankfully there are enough pieces here to make the watcher curious without somebody turning up to explain the entire backstory.
  
  
• It doesn’t hang around forever – The whole thing is only 49 minutes, which suits it, because otherwise it could could become exhausting if it was much longer.
  

Bad Points

• You can absolutely get lost – I’m not going to pretend I understood every bit of this because I didn’t, as the movie gives you pieces of information and expects you to put them together yourself, and sometimes I was still trying to work out what the hell I’d just watched.
  
  
• It is very deliberately slow – Maybe abit too slow, and you certainly have to be in the mood for it, as there are stretches where not a huge amount seems to be happening.
  
  
• Some of the footage is genuinely hard to make out – The degraded VHS aesthetic works for the atmosphere, but there are moments where the picture is so obscured, dark or distorted that it becomes difficult to actually tell what I’m looking at, which I know is purposeful, but I found it tad annoying, too.
  
  
• Some of the mythology is underdeveloped – There are some interesting ideas buried in the Church of the Holy Mother material, but it has the tendency to introduce pieces of its mythology faster than it develops them.

Final Verdict on The McKinney Family Home Videos Volume 2

The McKinney Family Home Videos Vol 2 is weird, very weird, but it is also uncomfortable at times, but if you’re a fan of the series, you will probably dig it, while everyone else might wonder what is going on.

The Church of the Holy Mother material also gives the sequel a bit more to work with than, and I liked getting further into Diana and Lilith’s story, and it also feels like Cotrufo knows exactly what sort of horror he wants to make.

My biggest problem is that it can be too vague, particularly if you haven’t seen the first film, and there are bits where I was interested in figuring things out and other bits I was a bit lost, which won’t bother everyone, but it did for me.

But The McKinney Family Home Videos Vol 2 has its own personality, and some of the imagery and sound are genuinely unsettling, and there is enough genuinely unsettling stuff here to make it worth watching, especially if the first McKinney worked for you.

The McKinney Family Home Videos Vol 2 Trailer
The McKinney Family Home Videos Vol 2 on foundfootage.com