Tears For Fears: Don't Cry Because It's Over

Year: 2019

Director: Michael Chaves

Cast: Linda Cardellini, Raymond Cruz, Patricia Velasquez 

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

So it's all come to this. My marathon of Llorona movies started at the literal inception of Mexican horror in 1933 and wound its way through the decades, past luchadors and cabin-in-the-woods slashers and bad modernizations and even animation to find its way to this very moment. I never expected the 2019 Conjuring-verse production of The Curse of La Llorona to be very good, I was just using it as an excuse to explore a cobwebby corner of horror I was interested in and knew almost nothing about. 

It's a good thing too, because otherwise ending here would be a huge letdown.

So here we are. It's 1973, and child protective services worker Anna Tate-Garcia (Linda Cardellini) encounters a case where a woman named Patricia (Patricia Velasquez) has locked her children in a closet. When she removes the children from her care, they are found drowned in the river the very next night. It turns out she locked them in said closet to protect them from La Llorona (Marisol Ramirez), an ancient Mexican folk legend who turns out to be very very real, and she's dressed like Cady Heron's ex-wife costume from Mean Girls.

Anna's own kids (Roman Christou and Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen) begin to be tormented by the spirit, and she must seek the help of Rafael (Raymond Cruz) a lapsed priest turned curandero, to save them before it's too late.

Though Lord knows why she wants to keep these bland ass children around, especially when they don't know better than to NOT follow La Llorona's trail of creepy evil breadcrumbs right the hell up to the swimming pool.

Let's make one thing clear. For as many virtues as this movie has (and frankly, there's not many), it utterly, completely fails to make any sense of the extremely simple Llorona legend. By forcing her into the framework and formulaic scares of a Conjuring style movie, they obliterate any personality she has as they ruthlessly continue to pile rule after rule upon her that they're clearly making up as they go along. 

For one thing, she's not an entity that actively seeks out victims and marks them with her very very hot burny hands (my absolute favorite of these idiotic developments). She's not weak against the trees that were next to her when she drowned her children (just like I'm not allergic to the tiles in the bathroom, the place where I have committed my greatest sins). She's not a demon who needs to be exorcised by someone who cherry-picks cool looking elements of Mexican brujeria but is still just totally a Catholic exorcist in function if not in name. She's a ghost who lives down by the river and drowns your kids. It's not hard! It might not be super narratively satisfying, but let's just do that story once, for the love of God!

I may have finally snapped, it turns out.

The Curse of La Llorona doesn't leave quite as bad a taste in the mouth as the previous franchise entry The Nun, but where that movie was powerfully stupid, this one is more just generic and bland. I know I'm not the most excellent barometer for this kind of thing considering how many of these I watch, but I was scared by this movie not one single time. James Wan may have perfected the formula for the perfect jump scare in the Conjuring movies, but his army of acolytes that make these spinoff ones are patchy at best. While Wan can pump his formula full of atmosphere and dread, here you can practically hear the director counting the beats offscreen. "One, two, three, and... spooky lady!"

The lack of real scares makes it even harder to buy the already weak premise of this movie. Ghost movies tend to have problems with the "rules" of how everything works, but this one is almost deliriously inconsistent with how corporeal La Llorona is. She seems to be deterred by a locked door in one scene, when mere moments before she floated right through a solid wall. If I was being scared and caught up in the moment, maybe I wouldn't notice. But I did, and now I'm pulling at these threads and my whole sweater is destroyed.

At the very least, this film is saved by a largely excellent cast. Raymond Cruz is chewing up the scenery like a woodchipper on full blast, and while he'll hardly be as iconically weird as someone like Zelda Rubinstein in Poltergeist, he's got a very strange energy going on that is quite compelling. And bless her heart, Linda Cardellini is throwing her all into this film. Her throaty roar of fear as she works desperately to protect her children is bone-chilling, and you buy every second of it. It sucks that the stuff she's screaming at is such fatuous bullshit, but that's certainly no fault of hers.

But there's a lot of people whose fault it is, and I'm questioning why they decided to make a movie about La Llorona in the first place, considering they clearly don't know who she is.

TL;DR: The Curse of La Llorona is further proof that even the Conjuring spinoff movies know almost nothing but diminishing returns.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 894
Reviews In This Series
The Conjuring (Wan, 2013)
Annabelle (Leonetti, 2014)
The Conjuring 2 (Wan, 2016) 
The Nun (Hardy, 2018)
The Curse of La Llorona (Chaves, 2019)

We've Got Spirits, Yes We Do!

For our Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.

Year: 2016

Director: James Wan

Cast: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Frances O'Connor

Run Time: 2 hours 14 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Really, the most spectacular thing about The Conjuring 2 is that original director James Wan actually returned for it after being offered a revolting amount of money to helm Furious 8. This is only the second sequel Wan has directed to one of his own films. While I was excited to see him returning for the follow-up to his pretty unequivocal best work, the last time he sequelized a movie, things got a little ugly. So it was with more than a little trepidation that I approached this one, but I can now officially say with a sigh of relief that The Conjuring 2 is leagues better than Insidious: Chapter 2.

Although that bar is so low it’s practically subterranean.

So, the plot. The Conjuring 2 has a more satisfying, tighter story than the original, although it necessarily runs into some of the same pitfalls: this film still has no idea whether it’s dealing with a ghost or a demon and in the process of telling its “true story” it continues to stolidly profess the undying verisimilitude of infamous paranormal hucksters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), something that always rubs my ectoplasm the wrong way.

But anyway, this – after all – is just a movie. It’s 1977. The Warrens are taking a sabbatical after an experience at a haunted house in Amityville (never heard of it)  has left Lorraine rattled. Their post-Amityville media tour has also gone haywire, with naysayers denying their claims left and right. When the church asks them to investigate a happening in England  (to make sure it’s not just one more of a rash of hoaxes before they get involved), Ed convinces Lorraine to come along because they never deny a family in need.

The family in question is down-on-her-luck matriarch Peggy Hodgson (Frances O’Connor) and her four children. Her youngest girl, Janet (Madison Wolfe) has become a conduit for a spirit who died in their house that has been tormenting them for weeks, or so they claim. Is this a real paranormal event or a ploy to get better housing? The Warrens are joined by believer Dr. Gross (Simon McBurney) and skeptic Anita Gregory (Franka Potente) to document the case.

Roll film, Lola, roll film!

There are certain things The Conjuring 2 does very well that utilize its nature as a sequel to actually better itself. The rapport between audiences and the Warrens has already been built, but instead of leaning on that crutch to paper up some quick and dirty exposition, screenwriters Chad and Carey Hayes (with Wan) use this to deepen their relationship and take it to the next level. You see, around the edges of this taut little supernatural shocker is a surprisingly rich love story. It’s not the most complex work in the world, but Farmiga and Wilson nail their chemistry. And the film’s structure commits to its tone, never allowing the romance to fade into the background, even in the gonzo third act setpiece where most movies of this ilk seem to forget that they were even telling a story at all, converting their characters into shrieking pinballs.

Now, the structure of the A-plot is a whole nother ballgame. While it’s much more linear and straightforward than the tangled mess woven by The Conjuring, at times it’s a hair too eager to tie up its loose ends. Two key plot points in the finale are solved with deus ex machina so brutally efficient that they shear off all but the barest residue of tension.

It’s a little too easy, like an episode of Dora the Explorer has been spliced onto the finale of an R-rated ghost story. Plus, the production design so viscerally yearns to foreshadow a third act reveal that you can practically feel it drooling over your shoulder. Imagine if M. Night Shyamalan had put little gravestones on Bruce Willis’ tie in The Sixth Sense, or put a huge poster of Ghost in his bedroom. This doesn’t ruin the flow of the movie in any terribly meaningful way, but it’s a bit of a letdown after a solid buildup.

I get let down, but I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down, Hollywood.

A little better, a little worse. Seeing how this is a horror sequel, we should be glad to have any of the former, let alone in the abundance we get here. Before we move on, let’s step off at two more of these. First, the production design is astounding here, turning a crummy British subdivision into a gothic nightmare castle using oppressive slate greys, subtle decay, and a balls-to-the-wall flooded basement that makes an impression even among the endless parade of creepy basements that is the horror genre. And then there’s the comic relief, which is warm, perfectly spaced out, and genuinely humorous, striking a balance that the more overtly wacky Insidious movies haven’t yet achieved.

But what of the scares, Brennan? They are, after all, the reason $40 million worth of people went to see it this weekend. Rest assured, Wan brings his almost metronomic perfection at shooting and timing jump scares in a way that makes them seem unexpected and elegant. Of course, they’re only jump scares, but he does them so well. Probably the most chilling scene in the film is a single, drawn-out shot that slowly alters your perception of reality using camera focus, but – you know – the jumps are good too. There is a certain haphazard approach to the buildup of the scares, trundling out some Big Boos then expecting us to still get scared by rocking chairs and whatnot, but for the most part it gets the job done.

I’ve always said that James Wan has made a career out of cribbing tropes and elements from pre-existing horror classics and repackaging them for newer audiences. Of course that’s what happens here as well, although he has amassed a large enough body of work that he can start copying himself now, too: haunted toys, elderly ghosts, and women in face paint abound, along with quotations from The Exorcist (obviously), Poltergeist, The Haunting, and even newer properties like Sinister or Oculus. It gets a little wearisome at certain points, but the individual elements of the film are strong enough that even the weaker patches don’t dull the shine.

The Conjuring 2 is a terrific sequel, more or less succeeding at matching the tone and pace of the first film and even fostering some improvements. Its weaknesses are perhaps more glaring and bothersome, but you could hardly expect a better result for a haunted house Part 2.

TL;DR: The Conjuring 2 is a worthy sequel with some diminishing scares but the same sure-footed classicism as the original.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1149
Reviews In This Series
The Conjuring (Wan, 2013)
Annabelle (Leonetti, 2014)
The Conjuring 2 (Wan, 2016)
The Nun (Hardy, 2018)
The Curse of La Llorona (Chaves, 2019)

My Boyfriend's Back

I'm looking into encouraging a lot more people to write - it's just such an incredibly fun experience that nobody seems to get anymore. So, inspired by last week's appearance by my friend Shannon on the pages of this blog, I encouraged my wonderful boyfriend Sergio to submit an article. It has been a running theme on this blog that our tastes are very different and I wanted him to argue for his side of things. He asked me to stick in an editorial here and there so everyone can see how much better his taste is than my own. Enjoy!

It was a fine Spring day when I met Brennan Matthew Klein on the banks of the Mississippi River. He was preparing to board a ferry boat that would take him west toward the Appalachian Trail, where he would begin his journey across all fifty states that would make or break his writing career. I’m of course only fooling, I met Brennan when he (rudely and unapologetically) bumped his chair into me at school, on January 29, 2014. I had no idea when I met this spritely young Irish/German/French lad that I would eventually sign on to what has been the best relationship of my young adult life. Sappiness aside, the boy has a thing for talking pictures and has made me watch my fair share of them since our first date.

[EN: For the record I was not rude OR unapologetic and he immediately ran away.]

Unfortunately for Brennan, he has a VERY specific taste for his idea of a good movie. As you may have already noticed, he loves Horror, which has been the bulk of his reviews thus far. Luckily, I have found ways to convince him to watch movies from other genres and, as a result, add diversity to his bland, blood-soaked palette. Under my tutelage and the use of various weights keeping him tethered to the ground, he has seen quite a few of my ‘indie dramas with strong female leads,’ as he affectionately describes them.

Thanks to his dear friend Shannon, who wrote a lovely piece on date nights and horror flicks, he asked me to compile a list of some of my films to showcase on his blog. Because not all of my suggestions fall under his label, I have dubbed this post "Nine Films for Nine Nonconsecutive Dates". 

Enjoy, Brenbots!

Nine Films for Nine Nonconsecutive Dates

#1 Ghost Town (2008, David Koepp)

With a budget of about $20 million I know this is not by any means an independent film, but with a box office of only $27 million, its net revenue qualifies it as such.

[EN: Sergio, your Econ major is showing.]

Ghost Town is a movie that follows the life of a dentist, Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais) who suddenly finds himself with the ability to see dead people. Upon his travels with the newly deceased, he runs into the ghost of a schmuck businessman, Frank Herlihy (Greg Kinnear) who wants him to interfere with his wife’s (Tea Loni) new relationship. With a runtime of 102 minutes, the movie is a great way to spend an afternoon laughing at Gervais shtick or the comedic stylings of Kristin Wiig, who shines in her small but laugh-packed role. The movie is a heartwarming comedy that can move even the most bloodthirsty horror fanatics to tears (that’s right, Brennan cried) and for five dollars on Amazon, it is most definitely a great buy.

[EN: The movies I decided to watch on our very first "stay in" date were Ghost Town, [REC], and The Devil Wears Prada so don't say I don't have diversity in my tastes. Ghost Town is one of my top 10 favorite movies of all time. And I'm not ashamed to admit it made me cry. Very few films can accomplish this, but Ghost Town and The Sixth Sense are two of them. Don't look at me like that. Also, yes that is a young Aaron Tveit in that screencap. Meow.]

#2 Winter’s Bone (2010, Debra Granik)

The film that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career into the stratosphere features her as Ree Dolly, a girl who is responsible for her younger siblings and invalid mother in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. The film starts off slowly, painting a picture of an average day in the life of Ree and her family, but picks up running when Ree finds out that her father has skipped town and posted their family home as collateral for his bail. Ree knows the types of unsavory characters that her father (and extended family) associated with and begins her trek to try and find him. Besides the fact that she is eventually joined by  her uncle played by John Hawkes, that is as much as I will give away about this movie. My only criticism of the film is that there are far too many blue tones. I get it, Missouri sucks.

[EN: This is the one film that Sergio has suggested to me so far that I just can't get into in any way. It's a lovely-looking piece, but I never connected with Ree's journey. I prefer my characters with more personal agency, but I know I'm in the minority with not being a fan of this film. You can read my review here.]

#3 A Single Man (2009, Tom Ford)

Tom Ford’s only movie to date is a little gem that packs great performances by its all star cast. Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult, Matthew Goode are featured, and even Lee Pace makes a cameo discussing bomb shelters and setting the mood that is the Cold War era of the early 1960’s.

Ford adapted the film from the novel of the same name by Christopher Isherwood and follows Firth’s character as he attempts to move past the loss of his partner (Matthew Goode). Though not necessarily somber, A Single Man depicts life as a gay male in the sixties as a less than ideal situation. In one scene, an uncreditided Jon Hamm has just delivered the news that Firth’s partner died in a car wreck, and that Firth would be an unwelcome funeral guest due to his being Goode’s Partner. This movie is anything but subtle and in the era of Mad Men it is a welcome addition, adding more emotion in a single still than January Jones' entire performance of Betty Draper.

[EN: I was mystified by the film's ending, but impressed with its un-self conscious and bold aesthetic. You can read my review here.]

#4 An Education (2009, Lone Scherfig)

Carey Mulligan plays a precocious high school senior (or the British equivalent) who is planning on attending Oxford in the fall. She asks herself the sort of questions that all young adults ask themselves at some point or another. Why am I doing what my parents tell me? What is the end goal of all this intense studying? I’m a female in the sixties (yes another one, I’m sorry), my only job opportunities are becoming a teacher or a secretary, why even bother? Ok, that last one is a question that thankfully today’s female youth does not have to ask themselves, but the theme of being young, foolish, and reckless is one that is any young college kid can relate to.

[EN: I honestly have never seen this one and, as such, can have no opinion. Especially considering the fact that I definitely thought this was a Holocaust movie, which it doesn't seem to be.]

#5 Doubt (2008, John Patrick Shanley)

Never have I ever been more afraid of nuns than when Meryl Streep played Sister Aloyisious, a nun who runs her parish with an iron fist. The movie begins with the suspicion that a priest (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) has been more than friendly with one of the students at the Catholic school. Streep is a nun, and like all nuns she answers to the priests of the Parish and must find a way to remove the student from the watchful eye of the priest without ‘stepping out of line’. Featuring additional performances by Amy Adams and Viola Davis, the movie leaves you guessing as to who you hate more: Meryl Streep for ruining a man’s career without a shred of proof, Hoffman who is the potential pedophile in question, or Davis for essentially being a mother who is willing to sacrifice her child’s innocence if it means he advances academically. I left Amy Adams out because no one can hate Princess Gisele.

I warn you that this movie is not for everyone. Described as “Streep porn,” if you found yourself in the audience that disliked August: Osage County, then I suggest you go another route and watch The Exorcist. It has nuns and guts, what’s not to like about that?

[EN: Ah, the first time I can chime in seeming like an expert. Unfortunately The Exorcist has neither nuns nor guts, but it does have doubt, a priest, and the unparalleled exorcism scene that you've seen poorly recreated in (insert modern possession movie here), so I highly recommend it. You can expect a review of Doubt coming soon, as Sergio is sending in a high pressure front to convince me to watch it.]

#6 Weekend (2011, Andrew Haigh)

Writer/Director Andrew Haigh hit a homerun when he released this earnest yet gritty gay indie film. What makes this film special in the world of LGBTQIA cinema (I’m sure there are more letters but I’m just not that progressive), is that at its core, the movie is a love story where the main characters happen to be gay. That’s it. There is no gripping coming out process, no ‘woe is me’ attitude, just two men with fantastic facial hair who fall in love in the course of a weekend. I will warn you that the film features graphic sex scenes between newcomers Chris New and Tom Cullen, but if you’ve seen Game of Thrones or Orange is The New Black, then you have been adequately prepared for the beauty that is man-on-man sex.

[EN: Weekend was a great film! I watched it over a year ago with our guest star, so its unfortunately outside the scope of this blog until I watch it again and have it fresh in my mind, but I agree with Sergio and highly recommend it. It's like a gay Once without the music.]

#7 Insidious (2010, James Wan)

Fun fact: This is the first horror film that I showed Brennan. He, of course, had many things to say about everything and I of course adore him for his criticism of James Wan.

With a budget of only 1.5 million dollars, the movie manages to pull off scary while avoiding cheesy… mostly. The film follows the ruggedly handsome family guy Patrick Wilson and his beautiful wife Rose Byrne as they settle into their new home with their average looking kids when things start to go awry. According to Mr. Klein, P.I. (Paranormal Investigator) the film follows in the footsteps of Poltergeist and The Exorcist, but I find it delightful just the same. Whatever your take on his filmmaking, Wan provides you with a cheaply made movie that will sustain your interest far more than the Michael Bay’s Robots Do Things.

[EN: I'm so lucky Sergio liked horror films before I met him. He's obviously more low key than Yours Truly, but I'm grateful for his contributions. And he's right. Insidious is an immensely derivative haunted house film - much like Wan's 2013 effort The Conjuring - but like The Conjuring, is a terrific example of the classic form utilizing its influences to elevate the material. And it's one of the scariest horror films rated PG-13 you'll find this side of 1960. You can read my review here.]

#8 In a World... (2013, Lake Bell)

A film that Brennan begged and pleaded to go see last year, this is a gem of a film featuring the crowd-pleasing Lake Bell who starred, wrote, and directed the entire production. In a World... follows Bell as she attempts to break into the voice-over world, which is primarily dominated by men. It’s a quirky feminist comedy that delivers a breath of fresh air into a room of old man dank. There are multiple definitions for the word ‘dank’ and this one encompasses them all, that’s just how smelly that room is. It might be too late to catch this movie on RedBox but you always find it On Demand or borrow it from Brennan. He will be only too happy to spend hours discussing it with you and what a fool (with your pants on the ground) you are for having waited so long to see it. You have been warned.

[EN: For the record, you are not a fool, but you do need to see this movie. It's my number 3 film of 2013 and a delightful comedy that I can rewatch endlessly. You can read my glowing review here.]

#9 Paranormal Activity (2007, Oren Peli)

This one is purely for Brennan. I hated it, but it is an independent film where the main actress kills everyone and if that doesn’t qualify it as an ‘indie film with a strong female lead’ than I don’t know what does.

[EN: I'm a big fan of the franchise despite my immense (and supported) hatred for PA4 and my intense (and divisive) dislike for PA3. I'll have to do a retrospective of the original trilogy soon. Let me know if that sounds like something you'd be into.]

That's it. I'm done. I hope that you found I have convinced you better than I have convinced Brennan to try out new movies. This has been a blog post by me, Shawn Ashmore. Hah, Brennan wishes.

[EN: What? Shawn Ashmore? Wherever would anybody get that idea? Clap clap for Sergio. Thank you for your contribution! So everyone? Do you agree? Do you disagree? Do you think I'm a fool for ignoring Meryl Streep's expanded filmography? Please let us know in the comments!]
Word Count: 2346

Came, Saw, Conquered

Year: 2004

Director: James Wan
Cast: Cary Elwes, Leigh Whannell, Danny Glover
Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

It's a bit uncouth in the film criticism community to share personal stories along with film reviews, but I've never been particularly couth to begin with, and the story of how I came to Saw is a very important part of my development as a horror fan.

You see, I have long denounced the Saw franchise for moral depravity and pointless gore, parroting an opinion I received in abundance during my formative years, during which there was a new Saw movie dropped on the world's stoop every year like a grisly present from a deranged cat. I learned from 22 Jump Street that there is a principle called "embedding" in which your brain sticks with the first idea it is given about a subject (see, movies are good for something), and that's exactly what I've been doing with this franchise.

Every criticism I leveled against the franchise and genre (moral bankruptcy, outrageous gore, trashy sensibilities) has been leveled against my own beloved genre, the slashers. The hypocrisy was getting so strong Courtney Love could have used it as a nightcap. And I was saying all this about something I'd never even seen and thus inadequately understood. You could say I was the One Million Moms of torture porn. Except actually successful.

But recently I decided to make an effort to turn this "blogging" thing into something more resembling a career. And my obstinate refusal to view the Saw franchise was inhibiting my path to becoming a successful analyzer of the genre for an utterly stupid reason. So no, I'm not throwing my morals away. I'm just realizing how misinformed they were. Over the next couple of weeks I will be visiting the Saw movies for the very first time, finally able to mock them for their real flaws instead of their perceived ones.

It's not like me changing my mind will actually alter the quality of these films, but nevertheless this is what my TV screen will look like for the foreseeable future and - who knows - maybe some surprises are in store.

As (flippin' A) pretty much everybody in the charted landmasses knows by now, the first Saw is actually really good and surprisingly un-gory, at least relative to its reputation. Except for the scene, the film plays more like a mystery thriller than an all access pass to Human Body: The Inside Story.

And on the relatively miniscule budget (about $1.2 million as compared to the sequels' mammoth budgets ranging between $4 million and a heart-stopping - for horror at least - $17 million), it would have been difficult for the green filmmakers to push it any further than they already had, especially with some of the well-known talent they had signed onto the project.

It all starts with a bathroom. Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) and Adam (Leigh Whannell, the film's writer) wake up in a dingy tiled space, chained to pipes on opposite sides of the room with a corpse lying between them leaking enough blood to feed a low-income family of vampires for a week.

How uncharitable.

Like Cube before it and Nine Dead (among dozens of other clones) after it, Saw's plot hinges on victims with hidden pasts trying desperately to find connections, discover why they're here and who put them there, as well as hide the dirty truths that inevitably play important roles in their predicaments. It's a plot style that has received an enormous workout in the decade following 2004, but Saw's inventive visual style and intricate plotting (to a point) absolutely hold up in a big way.

It turns out that the two men were brought here by the notorious Jigsaw killer (Tobin Bell), a deranged madman who puts his victims - all people he feels are either immoral or not appreciating their lives enough - in elaborate traps forcing them to either go through terrible mutilation and learn a new respect for life or die in a terribly gruesome manner.

If you're one of the two people (it used to be three before this week) who hasn't seen this movie, I'll let the flashbacks throughout the film clue you in on why these two particular men are here (Of course there's copious flashbacks. This film couldn't survive as a one room drama, the flaws in the writing and dialogue would shine too strongly if they weren't diluted across different places and times.).

Although many one-room dramas could be improved with the implementation of a reverse bear trap,

Now it's not perfect. Saw definitely has its fair share of flaws, as tends to happen with lower budget indie films. Or, you know, anything made by humans. Some of the props are a little cheap-looking, especially the chains that bind our heroes. The locations tend to be a little spare, although their dinginess is tied into the tone of the film so it's not necessarily damaging to the film.

What is damaging, and the reason Saw rings a little hollow at times, is the dialogue and the acting. Side character Detective Tapp (Danny Glover) gets a sense of the hamminess present and has fun chewing out lines like "We'll strike under the cover of darkness," but Cary Elwes gets swept away in the current of his arch dialogue and swiftly drowns.

When his accent isn't busy popping its head out like a timid groundhog, he's spitting out lines like one would spit out teeth - with a vague sense of nausea and a hint of pure terror, unable and unwilling to comprehend what's going on. And I'm not speaking about the character. That would actually be a great choice. I'm speaking of Elwes specifically. He seems faintly mystified by this whole "acting" business, perhaps unmoored by the absence of Robin Wright.

When you're out-acted by the man who wrote the film, there's a serious problem. When you're out-acted by not just one but several corpses, perhaps it's time to call it a night.

Well, at least he was trying.

Luckily, Saw has just as many things go right. The visual style is impeccable, especially considering that director James Wan wasn't the supernova presence he is today. With only one feature under his belt, 2000's Stygian, he still had a lot to prove.

The camera work, especially around Adam's youthful and unpredictable character (Dr. Gordon is shot with much more long, careful takes, mirroring his character) is vivid and brisk. Compounded with rapid-fire MTV style editing, it shakes you out of your seat with its dynamic electricity. Especially memorable is series of fast motion scenes in the middle of the film that detail Jigsaw's handiwork in other scenarios.

And though the dialogue is off, the plot itself is dense and engaging with every new piece of information clicking into the old. Perhaps one of the best indications of this style is that every single item in the bathroom proves useful to some degree or another, whether it be the obvious items like the corpse's handgun and cell phone, or the other artifacts discovered among the assorted rubble. It's rather like a game of Myst, a lot of the fun comes from discovering how all the disparate pieces fit together. (Like, say, pieces of a... Jigsaw. BOOM! Metaphor'd!)

Sure, a third act reveal is pretty dumb if you decide to pull at threads, but when you're in the moment everything is gold. And that puppet is hella creepy.

You'd think tricycles wouldn't be scary. You'd be wrong.

So that's that! My very first Saw movie. Hold the applause. All in all, I really enjoyed it and I'm glad to be proven wrong, at least by this installment in what was soon to be a booming franchise. Please don't be too mean to me for taking so darn-tootin' long to do it. I'm here now and that's all that matters. And now I have six more films to complete my education in one of the most important horror series of the past decade.

I hope you'll stick around longer than most of Jigsaw's victims tend to.

TL;DR: Saw suffers from some dialogue and performance issues but is nevertheless a thrilling puzzle.

Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1376
Reviews In This Series
Saw (Wan, 2004)
Saw II (Bousman, 2005)
Saw III (Bousman, 2006)
Saw IV (Bousman, 2007)
Saw V (Hackl, 2008)
Saw VI (Greutert, 2009)
Saw: The Final Chapter (Greutert, 2010)

The Furtherer

Year: 2013

Director: James Wan

Cast: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Barbara Hershey

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Who'd've thunk that the director of Saw would become the most prominent horror filmmaker of the decade?

Starting off with 2010's Insidious, a tight little haunted house thriller and continuing his horror collaborations with Patrick Wilson in this year's grand scale witchcraft/haunting/demonic possession shocker The Conjuring, Wan has risen to the top of pop horror for better or for worse. 

In my opinion, he's overwhelmingly derivative but clever enough to synthesize his sources into something that doesn't feel stale and hackneyed. So really, I don't mind. But, sitting as it is in the shadow of its older brothers, it's hard to go into his third haunted house feature of the decade without some measure of baggage, especially considering the super weird place where Insidious left off.

Remember that? [Warning, this review contains excessive SPOILERS for the original movie if you care about that sort of thing.]The old lady who had haunted Josh (Patrick Wilson) as a child had taken over his body, strangled the medium Elise (Lin Shaye) and snuck up behind his wife. She turns around, gasps, and CUT TO BLACK.

Horror movie or Sopranos episode? You decide.

This film starts about three days after that event and right off the bat we get two age-old horror sequel standbys that cement in my fears of how stupid this movie is going to be. First, the whole "Patrick Wilson is evil" thing gets shoved into a corner as his wife Renai (Rose Byrne) immediately trusts him again. This angle will play out in allegedly mysterious ways as we see her begin to doubt his sanity over the course of the proceeding weeks. Since we already know he's evil, this is just hella boring.

The second (and most egregious) offense is the sheer amount of scenes in the first 20 minutes in which characters say "Let me explain the entire plot of the first film to you, even though we both already know what happened." It's just plain clumsy screenwriting and the extensive flashbacks to Josh's childhood compound this with screechingly bad acting and very unnecessary depictions of events we have been told about twice already (once in the last film and once in the beginning of this one).

If you recall my review of Insidious, you'll remember that that film was an effective and scary film for the first two thirds but peters out, opting for a bizarre and out of place ending that goes on far too long. Chapter 2 is the opposite of that, so the good news is it gets better as we go along. The bad news is that for the first half of the film, what we get is Rose Byrne is Scared of Things 2.

This half of the film acts as a dictionary of horror tropes, cycling through a laundry list of clichés. It touches upon many of the old Insidious standbys and throws in Pausing a Videotape to Look at Ghosts, There's a Scary Lady in the Mirror, Mysterious Piano, and more! Wan is up to his old tricks, cribbing heavily from The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, The Changeling, Black Swan, The Silence of the Lambs as well as such seminal horror classics as Final Destination and Return to Horror High.

And just a dash of American Horror Story.

This entire section of the film is ineffably, laughably bad. The filmmakers falter at basic things like match cutting or making sure there's no dust on the camera lens. At one point Patrick Wilson teleports about ten feet in a one second cut. Almost as bad are the outlandishly stupid characters.

It takes investigators about fifteen minutes to realize that the dead bodies in a serial killer's house are victims, nobody seems to notice Josh is transparently murdery, and apparently Elise recorded her hypnotism of Josh as a child but then never rewatched the tape.

My personal favorite bit of dialogue is perhaps a bit hard to understand transcribed, but I'm gonna do it anyway because it's so indicative of the level of contempt Insidious 2 holds for its audience.

[Magic Ouija dice spell out "Our Lady of Angls" when asked where to find clues}

Paranormal Investigator: "Our Lady of Angles?"

Rose Byrne's Mom: "No. It's Our Lady of Angels. I know because... I used to work there."

No, you know because you have a basic grasp of the English language.

So. Not to beat a dead horse, but it's dire and embarrassing and the crowd was laughing uproariously the whole time.

And this lady who is in like five minutes of the film is in every single freaking promotional still.

But then! All of a sudden, you can feel a different film struggling to break through the mire. The first tremendously effective scare happens about three fifths through the film, and boy is it a doozy. I shouted in my seat and recoiled. Unfortunately, it is immediately followed by probably the worst scare in the entire film, but from that point on the terribly scary movie Chapter 2 so desperately wants to be begins to assert itself.

The second part isn't perfect with its inscrutable baby motif and mild transphobia but it really starts to pick up steam, chugging along with some terrific scares and a tie-in with the original film that could have been a cheap gimmick but works so brilliantly that it must have been planned out the minute they wrote the original script. And if not, it's an absolutely seamless bit of universe building.

It's involving, it's pretty terrifying, and it totally works. Even the obligatory sequel tag ending works in a way that completely gels with the narrative universe, more along the lines of The Conjuring than Insidious, which is really a great place to be, that film being Wan's magnum opus.

Again, Wan milks a PG-13 rating for every drop of atmosphere and dread. The lighting scheme inside of the house is beautiful and weird in a nod to Dario Argento that doesn't hold the tang of Wan's typical pilfering, the effects are realistic and brutal, and the final act zips along even managing to wring scares out of The Further, the location that absolutely killed its predecessor.

Although the flaws outnumber the successes, I am excited to see where this series ends up going. I never thought a sequel could work for the original film, but Chapter 2 showed spurts of excellence that prove there's more story to tell here.

Also she played the teacher in A Nightmare on Elm Street. So there's that.

TL;DR: Insidious: Chapter 2 is weighed down by a bloated and boring front half but still delivers solid PG-13 thrills.

Rating: 4/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Definitely one to marathon before the inevitable Chapter 3 comes out, but there are much more exciting horror films coming down the pike in October so don't fret if you miss it in theaters.

Word Count: 1178

Reviews In This Series

Insidious (Wan, 2010)

Insidious: Chapter 2 (Wan, 2013)

Insidious: Chapter 3 (Whannell, 2015)

Insidious: The Last Key (Robitel, 2018)

Haunted Mansion

Year: 2013

Director: James Wan
Cast: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Lili Taylor
Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

James Wan has found a niche and he's sticking to it. The Conjuring shares many of the same triumphs (and failures) as its predecessor, Insidious. Although, because it has an R-rating, it is necessarily one step above its baby brother.

The Conjuring serves up a tight PG-13 type haunted house movie that compiles iconography from sources as varied as The Amityville Horror, The Twilight Zone, Paranormal Activity 3, The Exorcist, and even the 2013 megaflop Dark Skies. And for a while, it is content to run along much on the same track as Insidious - having multiple obvious sources but being a good enough compilation of classic elements to not feel like a complete ripoff. And, like I have mentioned previously, nobody is making good haunted house movies anymore, so maybe a return to basics is what we need right now.

Unfortunately, this is basics.

Based on the true case files of the Warrens, a married team of paranormal investigators, this movie takes place in the fall of 1971. Carolyn Perron (Taylor) and her husband (Ron Livingston) have just moved into a new house in Rhode Island with their five daughters. As if having to take care of five rambunctious girls wasn't horror enough, they begin to hear strange noises in the night.

A variety of ghostly things happen - mysterious odors, clocks stopping, pictures falling of the walls - and it's enough to make Carolyn seek out the help of Ed and Lorraine Warren (Wilson and Farmiga). Ed just wants to return home to their daughter but Lorraine has a giving heart and convinces him otherwise. Despite Something Horrible that happened to her on a previous case, she is determined to save this family (the girls have stuck a chord in her heart).

Without giving too much away, it turns out that a bevy of terrible things have happened on this very plot of land. Basically this house has a bloodier backstory than Jigsaw himself. I was well on my way to giving this film a 6/10 review (competent but uncreative) when the story took a sharp left turn and went from a halfway decent haunted house flick to an actually pretty good exorcism movie.

Now, it still owes a lot to previous movies but the tension is ramped up as sh!t really starts to hit the fan.  Unlike Insidious, the extended third act is what really holds this film together. If this means that James Wan's powers are only getting stronger, I am very excited for Insidious: Chapter 2's release in September.

So. Based on a true story. This gimmick is used quite a lot in the horror genre (off the top of my head we have The Blair Witch Project, The Exorcist, and The Amityville Horror) to add an extra dimension to the fear. If the audience thinks that what is happening really occurred to some poor family, we're entering pants-soiling territory here.

Although we may never know what actually happened, this film is in fact based on a true family. The Warrens were a team of demonologists that practiced for over 50 years. In fact, they were the pair that investigated the original Amityville Horror. Basically this couple is Zelda Rubinstein from Poltergeist for a living.

Now is it true? Are there demons in our universe trying to infest our souls? Maybe. Maybe not. Nobody will ever know for certain, but if not there are still enough bizarre disturbances to keep the Warrens in business, so that means there's gotta be something, right? OOOOoooooOOOOoooooOOOOOO.

Author's Note: As I write this, there is a mysterious knocking coming from upstairs. I believe somebody is hammering some kind of manly woodshop project, but I am entering Stage 3 Heebie Jeebies.

If you wanna check out the Warrens' website, click here. It is a spectacularly awful example of 90's web design (replete with terrible "spooky" MIDI music and - notably - one page with musical accompaniment by a group of Gregorian monks chanting "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"). It's actually a comfort, because it's much harder to take them seriously this way.

Although if my sources are correct, Ed Warren is what is known colloquially as a "babe."

TL;DR: A notch above Insidious, The Conjuring is content delivering effective but routine scares before it veers into a far more interesting arena.
Rating: 8/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Yes, absolutely. Especially because most modern audience members are less jaded than I am and will get a kick out of it.
Word Count: 775
Reviews In This Series
The Conjuring (Wan, 2013)
Annabelle (Leonetti, 2014)
The Conjuring 2 (Wan, 2016)
The Nun (Hardy, 2018)
The Curse of La Llorona (Chaves, 2019)

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, and Something Red

Year: 2011
Director: James Wan
Cast: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Ty Simpkins
Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

When people find out I'm a horror buff they almost always ask if I saw Insidious, and until now my answer was no. I was much too caught up in the annals of 80's horror to be bothered with the new ones. My movie-watching field has since expanded and I found that I had missed out on one of the essential horror experiences of the year.

Did my experience live up to the hype? Well, yes and no. Insidious is chock full of borrowed elements and visual quotations from much better haunted house movies that were produced decades ago. At times it seemed like the filmmakers had bitten off more than they could chew, just throwing every ingredient in the pot and calling it a stew. Happily, it turns out that they were much more clever than that and even the most far-fetched elements fit into the narrative universe with very little manhandling and quite a bit of subtle foreshadowing.

Likewise, borrowing from other films isn't necessarily a crime. Many famous horror pictures wouldn't exist without standing on the shoulders of giants. And reintroducing classic elements to a modern horror audience was somewhat of a gift in the bland, chalky horror environment of the time. While Insidious didn't necessarily break any new ground, it was a step in the right direction for horror.

But let's throw all that analysis out the window for a moment. The most important thing Insidious does - and does well - is the rather impressive accomplishment of making a PG-13 horror film actually scary.

With frames like this, it's really not all that hard.

Josh (Wilson) and Renai (Byrne) Lambert have just moved into a new home with their three kids. Renai is a stay-at-home mom with dreams of becoming a successful musician, and the move was partially orchestrated so she can focus on her work. Her dreams are dashed for the moment when her son Dalton (Simpkins) falls into a mysterious coma and things start to go bump in the night.

It's easy to dismiss these early occurrences as stress or the house settling or what have you, but when she starts seeing mysterious people infiltrating her kids' rooms, she wisely decides that maybe they shouldn't be living in that house no more. To her dismay, the entities don't give up that easily and she calls in a medium (Lin Shaye) and her assistants (Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson - who I recently saw in the delightfully wacky Aussie flick 100 Bloody Acres).

The third act is where things start to get a little rocky as the parents try desperately to save their son. The climax is extended far beyond its capacity, the main villain is turned into a mockery of his terrifying self, and Josh exhibits some truly embarrassing Stupid Horror Movie Character behavior. This sequence is repetitive and features numerous false endings which drag the film on a good fifteen minutes longer than it needs to.

It's almost like being in a coma.

Despite the finale's shortcomings, Insidious is a well-crafted thriller that provides a lot of bang for its buck. Cheap haunted house movie scares don't get much better than this, and the red-faced demon that provides the film's major antagonist is unforgettable.

The film works within its PG-13 rating and thus manages to avoid being neutered by it. There's no need for profanity - this is a family with young children. There's no need for buckets of gore - that's not what this domestic horror film is about. It is about the fear of the things that go bump in the night. The fear of those dark corners in a place you know so very well. And the fear that your child has become ensnared by something so sinister that you have no possible way of saving him - whether it be a coma or a cherry red minion of the Antichrist.

Not to mention we are thankfully spared the torture of child actors.Yes, the main victim of Insidious is a young boy, but the film is truly about his parents' relationship and their attempts to save his life. Both adult actors are tremendous in their roles and Josh's fear of being inadequate for his family and Renai's fear of being trapped in her role as a housewife are the driving forces behind the most hard-hitting horror sequences.

This is a horror film populated by uniquely human characters that uses a classic haunted house framework to further explore the dynamics of its central family. It does have some unique spins on the genre tropes, but it mostly relies on tried and true methods to tell a story larger than itself. If it weren't for the ending, this movie would be much higher on my list. But it does have it and while it doesn't diminish the overall effect of a very good scary movie, it does knock it down a peg or two shy of being a modern classic of the genre.

TL;DR: Insidious is clever, insightful, and - most importantly - scary.
Rating: 7/10
Should I Spend Money On This DVD? Yes, this movie is great for slumber parties. Scary enough to have actual impact but not so much that you'll never sleep again.
Word Count: 899
Reviews In This Series
Insidious (Wan, 2010)
Insidious: Chapter 2 (Wan, 2013)
Insidious: Chapter 3 (Whannell, 2015)
Insidious: The Last Key (Robitel, 2018)