The Mysteries Of Sarah

Year: 2018

Director: The Spierig Brothers

Cast: Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke, Angus Sampson

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

The Winchester Mystery House is probably the most interesting, strange landmark in America to date. A seven-story maze of halls with staircases that led to nowhere and doorways that open onto ten foot drops that was under construction 24 hours a day, it's the kind of tourist trap that's both of architectural and paranormal interest. Any way you slice it, it's the perfect place to set a movie, and it's astonishing it has taken the world this long. What's even more astonishing is that the Winchester estate chose to make their big screen debut with this myopic dud.

The presence of Helen Mirren certainly must have helped, but why would SHE choose to be here? This film is just like the house itself, an enigma wrapped in a mystery.

The plot of Winchester is barbarically simple. The lawyers at the Winchester Repeating Arms company are "worried" that the majority shareholder Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren) - who has become a recluse in her ever-expanding sprawl of a mansion, believing herself to be haunted by the spirits of every person ever killed by a Winchester rifle - is too mentally unsound to run the company. They hire hallucinogenic-addicted, grief-riddled psychologist Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke) to assess her mental state and see if they can have her shares taken away from her.

I daresay it doesn't even count as a spoiler to tell you that she sure as sh*t ain't crazy. The house is riddled with ghosts, who spook Dr. Price to no end in a variety of mostly disconnected little vignettes until the Big Bad ghost reveals itself, whereupon this turns into a Conjuring rip-off starring Helen Mirren as Lin Shaye from Insidious. Bada bing, bada boom.

This is probably the only place in the world where tourism would actually increase after you make a horror movie about it.

I gotta hand it to the screenwriters here, they really did find a way to linguistically capture all the false starts and dead-ends that make up the twisted passageways of the Winchester house. The screenplay sets up so many threads that are either completely forgotten (like the good doctor's addiction to laudanum, which is completely dropped by the halfway point - though I really don't mind because there's nothing I like less than a "what's fantasy and what's reality?" theme in a movie where CGI ghosts are f**king people up) or hastily wrapped up in the turgid, busy finale.

And I shan't spoil things, if you somehow have such poor reading comprehension that you reach the end of this review and still want to check the movie for yourself. But let's just say that the final twenty-five minutes are some of the most exhausting horror movie boilerplate I've ever seen, erratically leaping from using well-worn tropes to paper over gaping plot holes to just pulling contradictory nonsense out of its ass in a weak, aching attempt to keep viewers invested. And the manner in which the Big Bad is vanquished is so laughably dumb, it'll remain in my quiver of awful movie scenes to discuss at parties for years to come.

You know what, I actually kind of like this screenshot. But don't be fooled into thinking it represents anything consistent or valuable about the movie.

The most astounding accomplishment of Winchester is that it achieves something I would have thought objectively impossible: it makes the Winchester Mystery House seem boring and bland. The bizarre geography and haphazard interiors should have provided at least an iota of interest and tension. Paranormal movie thrive on the inexplicable, and this house should have provided plenty of fuel to power a sense of menace, even if the ghosts weren't really providing (which they aren't, as the movie forces them through the hoops of a desperately generic haunting before undermining that with a revelation that just makes everything that came before confusing).

But no, this sprawling pile is rendered flat and lifeless by dull lighting that reduces it to a hazy gray background object, and a jagged editing style that refuses to connect any single room with another and make it all seem like a consistent structure. It's incoherent, but not in a way that highlights the natural incoherence of the structure. It bristles against every scrap of interest at every possible opportunity, plopping every scene into a jumbled pile that doesn't comment on any other in any meaningful way.

Just look at that... curtain? It's so... weird? Maybe?

But what of Helen Mirren, you ask? Well, she's certainly in the movie. And she probably had a lot of fun, but that certainly doesn't show here. It's not that she's not trying, but she's not pushed to do much of anything except sit still and stare gravely. The only way she could have saved the movie is if she milked the role of a reclusive, eccentric widow for all it was worth, making everything as big and purely camp as possible. By actually trying to do something realistic with her role, she recuses herself from that responsibility and tragically fades into the harried hash of a screenplay.

As for everyone else in the film, I could hardly pay them the compliment of saying they're even present. An actor I really like, the Aussie hulk Angus Sampson, has a scene or two and I'm happy to see him, but he might as well be the wallpaper. Scratch that, the wallpaper in the Winchester house would actually be interesting. And the de facto lead Jason Clarke can't justify the litany of Obviously Idiotic Horror Movie Character decisions he must make. 

At the end of the day, Winchester is an insult to the idea of the Mystery House, actively railing against the gargantuan promise and failing to do justice to a real life story that is loads more interesting than the rote, creaking ghost story told here.

TL;DR: Winchester is a major disappointment, wasting the incredible potential of a truly great setting and true story.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1019

Für Elise

Year: 2018

Director: Adam Robitel

Cast: Lin Shaye, Leigh Whannell, Angus Sampson

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

How has it already been seven years since the original Insidious? This franchise is already as venerable as Saw was when it reached its pre-2017 conclusion, and that's a cold hard fact I'm just not ready to face. 

Well, more than half a decade in we've reached if not a final film, at least a turning point in this baby brother franchise to The Conjuring: the film that connects the events of prequel Chapter 3 and the original film, completing the arc of Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye's medium character, who went from being the Zelda Rubinstein of the series to helming two horror tentpole features, which is by far the coolest thing about these movies). 

The fact that a 74-year-old character actress is now headlining movies for teens makes me absolutely giddy.

Insidious: The Last Key traces Elise's roots back to her hometown of Five Keys, New Mexico. When a client calls her to investigate a haunting in her own childhood home, she and her sidekicks Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Leigh Whannell, who returned to pen the script for the fourth time, beating out Saw, which he bailed on after three entries) encounter the demon Keyface (Javier Botet), who is the key to unlocking the secrets of Elise's past.

It's literally impossible to talk about this movie without accidentally making at least 32 key puns.

I initially approached this movie looking for subtext I could use for my new Dread Central column Brennan Went to Film School (first article out January 16th!), and I had my mind blown just a teensy bit. There is a lot of material surging beneath the surface here. While I chose to focus on the feminist Me Too metaphors for sexual assault and whistleblowing, there's also a lot of material about the cycle of abuse and creating your own family. I'm just getting this out of the way now, because I won't really be mentioning these things in my review, as important as they are. You'll just have to wait for my column, folks. It's a goodun.

But as surreptitiously smart as the film is, there's still something a little unsatisfying about the way the story plays out. The plot introduces a lot of threads that are never returned to (the opening quite obviously sets up that Keyface needs to open five doors for some nefarious purpose - and his fingers even have four out of five keys - but instead of having a Thanos-esque collection of keys provide our ticking clock to some grand evil, only one door is ever opened and that plot goes nowhere), some setups with microscopic payoff (they make such a big deal out of Specs having lights on his glasses, and then he never really uses them), and in general it just reeks of cuts and reshoots.

And the intelligence of the screenplay screeches to a halt every time Bruce Davison is onscreen as Elise's younger brother Christian. He is forced through a meat grinder of maudlin, exhausting family drama tropes that simultaneously accomplish the twin feats of deflating the tension and making him look like an idiot horror movie character.

The reason this has happened is that he went to a haunted house to find a whistle he had no reason to believe was actually there. His Mensa membership card is not in the mail.

Also, the real insidious presence that has always been in this franchise is the comic relief from Specs and Tucker, who can sometimes hit the perfect pitch, but mostly feel a little jammed-in and reek of flop sweat. That stench reaches its peak here, where most of the humor is mined from their creepy obsession with Elise's much-younger nieces, who arrive about halfway through the film and are subject to non-stop leering from that point on. It's creepy and it's icky, and it ever so slightly undermines the rest of the actually smart stuff the script has to say.

But... Taking all that into account, there is some pretty effective atmosphere at work here. The Last Key lacks most of the jack-in-the-box jolts that have defined the franchise (save for one scare gag, which utilizes a hoary old trope and flips it on its head in the best possible way), relying on some slow burn creepy imagery to add fuel to that fire. The key image from the trailers - the demonic finger key going into a girl's neck - is obviously incredible, as is the Keyface demon itself (I maintain that Javier Botet is the Lon Cheney of our time, bringing incredible monsters to life and consistently being the best part in films both terrific and mediocre, including [REC], Mama, It, The Conjuring 2, The Other Side of the Door, The Mummy, Alien: Covenant, Crimson Peak, and even The Revenant).

Plus, you can never go wrong with Lin Shaye. In her long career she's been handed a lot of crap, but the woman who can take a one scene role in Amityville: A New Generation and make it a layered portrayal/highlight of the movie has earned a lead role and she crushes it.

And I won't say much about this, but there is a plot twist that will send chills down your spine, blasting into the safe PG-13 world of The Last Key like a window suddenly opened to the burning sunlight. As a popcorn horror movie, it's weaker than the previous entries, but there's still something there that's more than worth seeing, if you're into this sort of thing. And to the tune of $51 million worldwide, it seems that somebody out there definitely is.

TL;DR: Insidious: The Last Key is a little bit underwhelming, but it's smarter than it has any right to be.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 977

Reviews In This Series
Insidious (Wan, 2011)
Insidious: Chapter 2 (Wan, 2013)
Insidious: Chapter 3 (Whannell, 2015)
Insidious: The Last Key (Robitel, 2018)

Ghost Of Franchises Past

Year: 2015

Director: Leigh Whannell

Cast: Dermot Mulroney, Stefanie Scott, Lin Shaye

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

James Wan and Leigh Whannell are a kick-ass horror team. Their first joint outing, Saw, changed the horror game of the early 2000's. I may not be a big fan of where that rabbit hole led, but the fact remans that their grubby shocker was one of the best of the business at the turn of the millennium. And their followup, Insidious (Dead Silence? Never heard of it.), is a chilling throwback haunted house tale that brought the fangs back to PG-13 horror and reintroduced the world to horror icon Lin Shaye, paving the way for a series of successful spooky tales like The Conjuring and Sinister.

Now, I was no fan of Insidious: Chapter 2, which I found to be juvenile and hackneyed, but the fact remains that their teamwork still produced a film with a handful of stellar scares and a fascinating visual palette. And God help me, but I do secretly love when horror franchises go a little off the rails.

The thing about Insidious: Chapter 3 is that its the first film in the franchise to cleave the union. With James Wan busy working on bigger, skydivier things, Whannell was left to his own devices, taking on the role of director on top of his screenwriting and acting duties. It's a lot to handle, and he does so admirably, considering. This third entry in the franchise has neither the creative gusto of the first or the brassy, bold aesthetic of the second, but it's a remarkably decent entry in a series unabashedly prone to reinvigorating the hoariest clichés of the genre.

This image could be from literally any movie released this decade. And my money's on Deliver Us From Evil, to tell you the truth.

Inidious 3 takes place several years before the events of the original film, meaning that the cell phones are blockier, the cars are more old-fashioned, and Dermot Mulroney gets starring roles in films. High school student Quinn Brenner (Stefanie Scott) lives with her overwhelmed single father Sean (Dermot Mulroney), who has an important, manly job like Contractor or Foreman or something. She meets with the medium Elise (Lin Shaye) in an attempt to contact her dear, departed mother. Unfortunately, when she reaches out into the spirit world, something else reaches back. 

After she breaks her legs in a car accident following an audition for a renowned theater school, she finds herself being haunted by The Man Who Can't Breathe (Michael Reid MacKay, who also played the Mummy in the prestigious Monster Squad), a mysterious inky black ghost wearing a gas mask that seems to live upstairs and travels through the vents into her room at night. Calling upon the help of Elise and her soon-to-be sidekicks Specs (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson), the Brenners must face the most evilest evil ever unleashed.

Which retroactively makes the first two films just that much more confusing - you'd think Elise would know how to handle things by then.

This time, instead of taking cues from Poltergeist like the first films, the plot has a very Exorcist slant. Points for variety I guess. You know: little girl possessed by an entity that may or may not be masquerading as her sickness, single parent watching nervously from the sidelines, and a plot that focuses more on the expert helping her (Elise, being the big franchise link here, gets a much expanded role, including shutting down her business following the grief of her husband's death and threats from an otherworldly force). It's textbook stuff, really.

Insidious: Chapter 3 has its share of flaws but I enjoyed it, so let's keep things positive and get the complaining out now so we can get to the good stuff. First of all, the plot is very dub. That was unavoidable, especially for a film set in the same universe as Insidious 2, in which plot twists were to be found in places that should have been thoroughly checked over 3 decades before. I'm still mad. Nothing in this film is quite so enervating as that, thankfully, but there are still a variety of insoluble problems at the script level.

The beginning is beholden to some claptrap paranormal-babble, which is par for the course, but the simplistic, kindergarten-esque insistence on dark vs light is a little cloying. However, the real issues begin with the third act, which always seems to be the turning point for these films, and Leigh Whannell's weakest link as a writer. The heroes attempt to solve their problem by doing the exact same thing that screwed them up the first time, the only way they're saved is through a Mount Olympus-worth of deus ex machina, we're asked to be shocked by several twists so immensely obvious they can be seen from space, and at one point Lin Shaye inexplicably turns into Ripley from Aliens.

In addition, Dermot Mulroney can't find anything to do with his character, which is a shame considering that he's the thematic and emotional lynchpin of the film,with his fear that he might lose hi daughter to the inevitability of death just like his wife. It's interesting enough in its recitation that he doesn't ruin the film, but the role might as well have been performed by a cardboard cutout of Mel Gibson. Luckily Lin Shaye returns to form, instilling real terror into her broken and fragile Elise, though she trips up occasionally on her more treacly cheerful scenes.

I don't think this woman has played a happy role in her life.

But hey! We can be negative until the cows come home, but we can't milk them with a frown. Or... something. Let's move on to the good stuff. 

Insidious 3 isn't a knock-your-socks-off terror gauntlet, but it's a well-oiled boo machine with a couple lasting frights sprinkled amid the jump scares. There's perhaps nothing more frightening than the one or two truly stellar moments of Insidious 2, but as a whole, it is far more consistent in encapsulating the roller coaster of screams that most modern horror strives to be. The viscous, oily design of The Man Who Can't Breathe is nightmare fuel in its own right, and his intensely terrifying visage amps up even the most feebly generic moments.

The franchise's signature comic relief is also present, in extremely palatable amounts. Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson have shown a penchant for horror comedy (though, if I were to pick between Insidious and 100 Bloody Acres, it would be the latter any day of the week), and here their work is reliably charming, though it thankfully doesn't overpower the horror.

The Further is perhaps the least appealing returning element, though it does afford the film its only truly spectacular image: a blood red elevator door lost in a chill blue ghost dimension. Why the ghosts would feel the need to use an elevator, especially in their ectoplasmic domain remains unknown. But hey! Insidious: Chapter 3 is decently pretty, pretty scary, and scarily funny, so it's far from a disappointment, all things considered.

TL;DR: Insidious: Chapter 3 is a great addition to its franchise with its cheery dumbness and a variety of effective if cliché scares.

Rating: 6/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Only if you really liked the first one. You do not need to see the second. Don't feel the urge to catch up, I beg you. 

Word Count: 1252

Reviews In This Series

Insidious (Wan, 2010)

Insidious: Chapter 2 (Wan, 2013)

Insidious: Chapter 3 (Whannell, 2015)

Insidious: The Last Key (Robitel, 2018)

Road Rage

Year: 2015

Director: George Miller

Cast: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult

Run Time: 2 hours

MPAA Rating: R

Action movies aren't really my thing. I can muster up an appreciation for them, as with most films, but when a new action flick comes out in the theater, I usually just leave it to my friend Zach at Better Clear On Out the Back. 

And I'm no Mad Max fanboy, either. In fact, I haven't seen any of the original three films in the franchise (though that will be swiftly rectified this summer).

I'm telling you these things so you can properly understand the gravity of my statement when I tell you that Mad Max: Fury Road is the best damn movie of 2015 so far. Hell, I'm going to go ahead and call it right now as the best movie of the summer. 

Unless San Andreas pulls the rug out from under us all. 

Mad Max: Fury Road has a plot. In fact, it's quite involved, taking place in a lush world that's teeming with detail. But the tricky part is distilling it into a couple paragraphs, because so much of it takes place at the fringes of the main action, informing and instilling life into it, but not necessarily playing an active role in the goings on.

I want to make it clear that this is not a detraction. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The true narrative of Mad Max: Fury Road is buried within every detail of the production design, every line of dialogue, and every line in the sand. It is a film that not only assumes that you - the audience member - are intelligent and demands that you engage with it as an active viewer on every single level, but richly rewards you for doing so.

Anyway, the bare bones of the thing is this: Max (Tom Hardy) is a guilt-ridden wanderer through the post-apocalyptic, irradiated desert of what we can assume through franchise pedigree is Australia. Haunted by the ghosts of the people he couldn't save, his only instinct is to survive the barren terrain. The only ample source of water is the Citadel, which is ruled by the diseased despot Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and his mutated brood.

So, basically it's California in three years.

When the town champion Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) diverts her war machine on what was supposed to be a routine supply run, Immortan Joe realizes that she has absconded with his wives, the enslaved healthy women which he uses for breeding. Max has been captured and used as a human blood bag for Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a member of the sickened, brainwashed slave race known as the Half-Lives. As the nobles of the Citadel pursue Furiosa along with their Half-Life army, Max escapes and reluctantly joins forces with her. She wants to take the girls to the Green Place, a safe zone across the continent, and he just wants to survive, but for the time being they find it mutually beneficial to work together.

I mean, she needs someone to help make sure her super awesome makeup isn't smudged. The ass-kicking she can handle herself.

The most definitive aspect of Fury Road is its outrageous sense of style. Its dominating aesthetic is downright lunacy, pushing so far over the top that it's visible from space. From the bulbous, fleshy creatures inhabiting the Citadel to the wraithlike Half-Lives who run staccato like they're in a Keystone Cops short, the film constantly prods and challenges the traditions and tenets of film costuming and design.

And they ain't afraid to be disgusting.

These delightfully insane characters populate a world of ramshackle glories: souped-up cars with porcupine spikes, massive green towers with waterfalls that flow over the unwashed masses, men dangling on pikes, and just about everything you can imagine. With a healthy sprinkling of things that you can't, which is what separates the geniuses from you or I. And this world is lit with bold, saturated colors that assault the frame with unnatural beauty.

Da ba dee, da ba die.

It's bloody gorgeous, is what it is, and this ludicrous, beautiful, terrible world is the perfect setting for the most unflagging, high octane action flick I've ever seen. Fury Road hits the ground sprinting and only picks up the pace from there, hardly even stopping to introduce its narrative universe, asking you to pick it up from the flecks of shrapnel that fly through the haze of battle.

As Max, Furiosa, and the Breeders storm their way through one massive action setpiece after another, the excitement never dwindles. Some all-action films can get dull and repetitive, but Fury Road knows the game and plays it with admirable skill. Packing handfuls of story, emotion, sacrifice, and distorted dystopian imagery in between every frame, there is more than enough to chew on aside from the truly astounding, ever-escalating practical effects work that dominates the landscape.

Honestly I'm surprised that director George Miller (of the three Mad Max films and most recently - and bafflingly - Happy Feet and its sequel) received the budget that he did to put this film together at such an unrelenting, raucus level, but the fact the Mad Max: Fury Road exists means that somebody is doing something right in Hollywood.

Also whoever designed the flamethrower guitar has an automatic pass to marry me.

As if we needed anything more to like about the film, the acting is across the board superb. Charlize Theron shows no cracks as a dauntless warrior, the villains are uniformly and unequivocally menacing, and Nicholas Hoult utterly inhabits a role as screamingly high octane as the film itself, but the unbeatable standout is Tom Hardy. 

With nothing but a few choice words and a series of animalistic grunts, he paints a detailed and nuanced portrait of a man broken beyond his own humanity. His impressively physical accomplishment completely transforms the actor, ripping him out of any sense of reality and throwing himself directly into the heart of the Mad Max universe. If any performance were to permanently break the barrier between summer blockbusters and Oscar nominations, it's Tom Hardy right here, right now.

The cherry on top of the towering ice cream sundae that is Mad Max: Fury Road is that it's a remarkably feminist and progressive action piece. The large amount of women in the film leave a safe, but enslaved life for the dangers of independence and claim their personhood. One of the Breeders says "We are not things,"and she is absolutely right. The women of Fury Road are an unstoppable force of good, fighting against a world that devalues them.

Also, ableism be damned.

It's a fascinating, energetic, wonderfully realized action film that never loses fuel, and it's spectacularly unlike anything you've ever seen before. Fans of more sit-down, low key dramas are best advised to sit this one out, but I think its unrelenting, explosive charm should appeal to just about anyone with a pulse that needs racing. 

TL;DR: Mad Max: Fury Road is outrageous, high octane, nonstop fun.
Rating: 10/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Yes, unless you really hate exciting movies.
Word Count: 1195
Reviews In This Series
Mad Max (Miller, 1979)
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (Miller, 1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller & Ogilvie, 1985)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)

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)

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)

Horror on Party Beach

For our podcast episode about this very film, please click here.

Hello! The time has come for my big announcement!

I just got hired to write for an indie publication called CinemaBeach. It's unpaid, but there are some press perks and it's a very exciting opportunity.

I will be running a horror column called Killer Waves and reviewing new indie horror releases, which means I get to go to the Laemmle Theatre in Beverly Hills (and the nearby Sprinkles Cupcake ATM) a lot more often.

I will of course keep posting here. I like to review every movie I see and CinemaBeach has no use for mainstream movie reviews.

However, when I write a post for the website, I will link to it here and consider my work done for the day. One post a day is my goal and I don't think anybody can complain if that post is in a slightly different format.

My first official review in my new capacity is of the Australian import 100 Bloody Acres, and please check it out. I'm very excited.

Note: Because the format is different on CinemaBeach and doesn't include ratings, I will post my usual information here along with a link to the article.

100 Bloody Acres

Year: 2013

Director: Cameron Cairnes

Cast: Damon Herriman, Angus Sampson, Anna McGahan

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: UR

Leave it to the Aussies to find the fun in bloody mayhem. 100 Bloody Acres is filled with wicked glee ,whether it’s presenting a severed hand, a vat of carnage, or a local radio jingle. Taking place in a small town in the Australian Outback, the film follows a group of three teenagers who are on their way to a music festival. When their car breaks down (as vehicles in these types of movies are wont to do), they are given a lift by Reg Morgan (Damon Herriman) of Morgan Organic, a local blood and bone fertilizer company.

Unfortunately, times have been tough for Reg and his brother Lindsay (Angus Sampson) and they have been forced to cut corners in order to make ends meet. Lately Reg has been culling new blood and bone material by appropriating still warm bodies from roadside wrecks. He is in the middle of delivering a bloody metalhead when the hitchhikers discover the corpse and the brothers are faced with a tough decision.

On one hand, they could threaten them to keep their mouths shut and send them on their merry way.

On the other, they could really use fresh fertilizer for a big delivery this afternoon.

What ensues are hearty laughs, geysers of blood, and a comic examination of the interactions between country folk and city slickers. This horror comedy is decidedly more funny than scary (the filmmakers were more keen on making you cringe instead of shriek), but the humor is so devilish that the dearth of scare sequences is not to be lamented. Some would even go so far as to call this film a straight comedy, but the humor is hung on the framework of movies like Saw or Hostel, and in fact could not have existed without their influence. As it happens, the audience is too busy laughing to discuss the intricacies of genre.

A standout performance is Damon Herriman, whose Reg is simple, polite to a fault (even when taping someone’s mouth shut), and too scared of his big brother to raise a stink when it comes to his alternative business methods. Cute as a puppy dog, Herriman somehow manages to make Reg an audience favorite despite some of his more morally reprehensible actions. His inherent goodness hangs in the balance of a delightfully subtle portrayal for which the filmmakers should be immensely grateful. Drinking a juice box while covered in blood is a naturally funny concept. But with Herriman behind the wheel, it is not only a silly gag but an important character moment.

Also a standout is Anna McGahan’s Sophie, a strong woman whose role is key in subverting the historically misogynistic slant of the torture genre that the film is riffing on. There is a particularly vicious case of slut shaming at the middle mark that would make any feminist cringe, but the characters that view Sophie’s sexuality as immoral get their comeuppance in the end. In fact, a diatribe against her actions is explicitly detrimental to one character’s survival. It reflects very well on the filmmakers that they not only take a stance on a hot button issue, but avoid bludgeoning the audience with a “moral”. It’s obvious that we should root for her character, and we do. That’s all there is to it, no need to make a fuss.

One of the biggest strengths of the movie (besides Sophie being one tough sheila) is that every character’s actions logically follow from their circumstances and personality. Albeit that logic is somewhat twisted, but it makes perfect sense in the heightened cinematic reality of the film. There is a complete lack of dumb horror movie character behavior and, though mistakes are made, the setups are unforced and avoid the common “Don’t go in the basement, stupid!” pitfalls.

Regrettably, sometimes Australia-specific jokes or concepts will fall flat for American audiences (John Butler? Australia Day?), but in general the humor is broad enough for international audiences to enjoy and sharp enough that even if one doesn’t understand a particular cultural reference, it frequently adds to the absurdity rather than detracting from the audience’s understanding. But that is beside the point, because the film is necessarily Australian. Many plot points hinge on social, economical, and environmental structures unique to the country. For example, many horror movies accentuate the protagonist’s predicament by placing her in a far-off location where nobody can hear her scream – the mountains, a cabin in the woods, and sometimes even space.

In Australia, every single place is like that.

The movie is far from flawless, but the humor is satisfying and rich, the gore is suitably realistic and campy for the bloodthirsty horror faithful, and the underlying message is sincere but not too preachy. 100 Bloody Acres is a must-see for fans of comedy and horror alike, although more squeamish audience members may wish to sit this one out.

TL;DR: Bloody good fun, with a uniquely feminist and frequently hilarious riff on the backwoods torture genre.

Rating: 8/10

Should I Spend Money on This? It might be hard to catch it in a theater, but it's a worthy film to catch on demand for a night in.

Word Count: 908