Movie Spotlight: Say Cheese 2

A cursed 80s camera does not care whose hands it lands in next. It only wants a face, a flash, and a reason to keep taking. Get caught in its lens and there is no getting back out, not really, not even if the camera itself goes missing for years.

Frank Palangi wrote, directed, scored, and acted in the sequel, expanding a mythology he stumbled into almost by accident. He found the camera itself on Facebook Marketplace for five dollars, planning to use it as a prop and nothing more. Then he looked at it again. “There’s somethin’ darker here,” he says, and the whole premise clicked into place around a question most people would rather not sit with: what if taking pictures, making memories, could kill you? What if you could never take another one again?

Always a two-part story

Palangi never planned to stop at one film. “I always viewed the idea as a two part movie,” he says, and set out to give the sequel a different pulse than the first, something faster and more upbeat rather than another slow burn. He joked to the cast that he might make seven of these before he was done. He was only half joking. “You never know,” he says. “There’s a lot to do with that story and where to take it next.”

A caretaker, not just a killer

The camera in Say Cheese 2 does not act alone. Palangi built out a figure he calls the keeper, someone who does the camera’s bidding and takes people’s essences to keep it fed. It was a deliberate swerve away from the haunted object films he had already seen. Woven through that mythology is a second horror, quieter but just as suffocating: nobody believes the person trying to warn them. A rival podcaster accuses Cassey of faking the whole thing for views, using AI to gin up an audience. “No one would believe her,” Palangi says, describing a spiral where asking for help and getting laughed at becomes its own kind of trap, with no clear way out.

Warren County, for real

The film's geography is not invented. Mia’s Pizzeria, the coffee shop, the Thai place Cassey and her partner argue in before things fall apart, all of it sits in Warren County, New York, a place Palangi knows well. “Very personal,” he calls it, and he is grateful to the people who let him film there, the Strand Theatre included. This is not the first time he has set a killing spree in this stretch of upstate New York. His earlier film American Psychopath shares the same county, along with a planned Warren County, Farm House project, all quietly building toward one shared timeline of unsolved cases.

His own music, hiding in the background

Palangi has spent years chasing a career in music before landing here, and Say Cheese 2 lets him fold the two together. A track called “Remembrance,” pulled from his own catalog, plays low during one of the film's quieter scenes. “It's free for me to use any song in my catalog, so as long as it fits the scene, I said why not,” he explains. The film's cameo list runs just as personal: the wrestler Brimstone, Van Halen video veteran Lori Tucker, Masters of the Universe's Callum Chiplin, and Happy Gilmore 2's Ken Holmes all show up as podcasters circling the story from the outside.

What the mythology leaves unsaid

Phone calls with codes like 882-000. Six years of killings dating back to 2020. Fifty cold cases and a camera that cannot be destroyed, only hidden. Palangi kept much of that backstory deliberately vague while filming, holding pieces back for future installments. “Everything doesn't always have to be explained,” he says, pointing to 70s and 80s horror as his model, films people are still arguing about decades later. Since he already knew there would be at least two movies, he could afford to withhold.

What to know before you press play, in Palangi's own words: “You don't have to take it so serious like some of the modern films, 'Cheese' is in the title lol. You don't have to watch part 1 to enjoy part 2. If you like throwback 80's horror retro feel and if you enjoy filmmaker stories, this is the film for you.”

Horror

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Streaming now on Relay.