The Weekend Review: Insidious: Chapter 3

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

Going into the movie, Insidous: Chapter 3 was one of my most anticipated movies of 2015.  And it wasn't just because Blumhouse Productions is almost unerringly good at making horror movies.  With the first two movies, James Wan made a shockingly nuanced and highly visceral world of spectral terror.  The degree to which the second movie exploded the series' mythology outward actually made me appreciate the first movie more than I had, and I had every reason to believe that the franchise's third instalment would do the same.

After her mother's death, distraught teen Quinn Brenner tries desperately to reach out to her.  When she attempts to make contact through retired medium Elise Rainier, she is given an ominous warning to never try to contact her mother on her own again.  Because when you call out to one of the dead, all of them can hear you.

But it's already too late for her.  A spirit has already answered her call, and it's not her mother.  Possessed and at risk of having her soul devoured, it's up to Elise, her father and an unlikely pair of ghost hunters to bring her back from "the Further."

Although still thoroughly enjoyable - especially for long-standing fans of the series - the film ultimately fails to live up to the rest of the series' promise.  It's just a little too reliant on jump scares and it's pacing is just a little too ill-timed to permit it to take its place in the pantheon of Blumhouse's other successes.

These issues are invariably due to James Wan's departure from the series in order to direct Furious 7.  Longtime collaborator Leigh Whannell is a well-enough director, to be sure, but he lacks the sense of timing and suspense that made Wan a household name among horror fans.  His framing is adequate, his lighting is sufficiently moody and it's obvious that he knows the difference between shocking and frightening.  So even though he dips a bit further into jump scares that I personally care for, they are used properly (to accentuate drawn-out moments of tension) and more sparingly than the genre's biggest offenders.

Casual movie-goers will be treated to a fairly standard horror flick about ghosts and the busting thereof: a little worse than the first movie, but not bad in its own right.  Fans of the series, however, will be treated to a plethora of in-references to the previous movies, including cameos by Insidous' Lipstick Demon and Insidious: Chapter 2's Bride in Black.  There are a few great visuals that will stick with you well after you walk out of the theater (in particular, Quinn's tormented soul in the Further) and a few genuinely well-played scares.

The real problem with the film, however, is the fact that I found myself far more drawn to the narrated back-story about Elise's suicidal husband, her journeys into the Further to find him and the spirit that she brought back with her from that dark realm than I ever was with the main plot of the movie: Quinn's possession by the Man Who Couldn't Breathe and the reunification of her soul.  The former was a far more emotionally resonant story, far more interestingly handled and with a set of far more meaningful and personal stakes than some random girl who misses her mother.

So if you're a fan of the series or just in the mood for a good scare, you could do far worse for yourself than Insidious: Chapter 3.  It's the best - if the least ambitious - horror movie to come out this year, beating out the disappointing Lazarus Effect, the almost good It Follows and the surprisingly solid Poltergeist.  Fans will find plenty to love about a third go-around with some of their favorite characters, even if it's wrapped up in a somewhat duller plot than they're used to.

Rating: 6.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Only if you want to own the entire series.

So how do you think that Insidious: Chapter 3 measures up to the rest of its franchise?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Trailer Park: Our First Look Into Sinister 2

In which I discuss the latest movie trailers.

I haven't been shy around here about my love of horror movies nor how highly I've been anticipating Sinister 2.  It was unquestionably the best horror movie to come out in 2012 and arguably the best to come out of the 21st Century so far.  And now that we've gotten our first teaser trailer for the movie - 17 uninterrupted seconds of horrific bliss - I'm beginning to feel that my faith in it has been well-founded.  Check it out here:

Except for a few recent slip-ups, Blumhouse Productions has been the absolute pinnacle of 21st Century horror.  Sinister was a perfect example of this: a tersely structured film with a somewhat original premise, whose scares were based more on an understanding of old-school suspense than on jump scares or gore.  It featured realistic, likable characters who knew when it was time to cash out and run (even if that turned out in retrospect to be the worst move imaginable).

Remember when the highest praise I could give to a movie was the reaction of a seven-year-old that I was with?  The highest praise that I can give Sinister is similarly how it affected those around me when I showed it to them.

Becky and I showed it to a mutual friend of ours who was nearly as big a horror fan as I am.  When editing a novel that she was working on, she would have The Shining on the TV in a constant loop for inspiration.  Whenever I suggest to my friends that we take in a horror movie, she was the first to say yes.  She wasn't a genre lightweight and took the big scares like a champ.

Sinister reduced her to a terrified wreck, to the point that I felt like the world's biggest jerk for showing it to her in the first place.  We chased it with Megamind - a happy-go-lucky Dreamworks superhero movie starring Will Farrell - so that she wouldn't go to bed with visions of Baghuul dancing in her head.  When we asked her how she slept the next morning, she told us that she was still plagued by horrific nightmares throughout the night and barely slept at all.  After that, she gave up horror for well over a year, only recently returning to the genre.

Anything coming off of that kind of a reaction has some pretty big shoes to fill, but Sinister 2 seems to be taking everything in hand.  There's a new family moving into a new home that will evidently discover a new set of film reels.  Whether they're moving into the same home from the end of the first movie remains to be seen, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit if they were and we saw some familiar faces from the first movie pop in for a visit.

The most interesting addition is the trailer's voice over, which appears to be one of the children glimpsed watching the movie in the attack.  Fascinating for me, however, is how those children don't seem to be fed upon by Baghuul like the other children under his influence seemed to be, which leads me to believe that they do not belong to him in the same way that the others are: at least, not yet.

Although I only have a few short seconds to go off of, I think that I might be able to guess at what the movie's plot is, at least in part.  What if the parents aren't the ones to find the film reels, but the neighborhood children, playing in an empty home where they definitely don't belong.  They fall under Baghuul's influence, and play out his sinister games on a much wider scale: targeting all of their individual families (and the new family moving into the house) just as much as Ethan Hawke's character and his family were tormented in the first movie.

At any rate, it's something to think about, and would make for one Hell of a movie.

So what do you think is going to happen in Sinister 2?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Trailer Park: Insidious: Chapter 3's Second Trailer

In which I discuss the latest movie trailers.

I understand why they do it.  I really do.  You hook the audience with the first trailer, and then all the ones that follow are meant to remind them that the movie actually exists and is coming.  The more people actually see something, the more likely they are to actually see it.  I'm just sick and tired of movies Tomorrowlanding me with unnecessary second trailers.

Insidious: Chapter 3 had me sold at the mention Blumhouse Productions.  Although they've recently stumbled in their otherwise unerring success, they are still the premiere name in contemporary horror and the first two movies combined were some of the best of the genre this century.  Their first trailer was surprisingly horrific on its own, and paired with their reputation as a production company and coming off of their string of popular horror movies, it was all that anybody needed to see to be convinced of seeing the series' third installment.  But they just couldn't leave well enough alone.

The most recent trailer suffers from what I've come to refer to as Tomorrowland Syndrome: when a trailer overexposes or over explains itself to its audience, usually after the first trailer already sold us on wanting to pay $10 or more a ticket to see it in the first place.  The new trailer is riddled with non-endearing jump scares and lingers both too long and too frequently on its the supernatural villain.  A few moments that might have had actual shock value in the film - like the innocent girl having her soul devoured by the dead - will have to work twice has hard for the same response after we've already seen it in the advertising.

Am I still going to see the movie after this trailer?  Yes, but that's besides the point.  All that this trailer serves to do is spoil its already captive audience of the content of the movie that it's already sold them on.  It stands to lose more through overexposure than it stands to gain by reminding people of its pending release.

Still worth seeing in theaters:  Begrudgingly yes.

So are you planning on seeing Insidious: Chapter 3 in theaters?  Share you thoughts in the comment section below.

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Unreality Companion: Why Blumhouse Productions Is the Only Real Name in Horror Right Now.

In which I develop on the content of my weekly Unrealitymag.com article.

As I mentioned in this week's Unreality article. Blumhouse Productions - the minds behind Oculus, Sinister, The Conjuring, Paranormal Activity, Insidious, The Purge and their sequels - is the only real name working in the horror genre these days.  While other companies are more concerned with remaking, rebooting and churning out sequels for decades-old franchises that have been limping along to increasingly little fanfare, BH Productions has been revitalizing the genre with original, inventive and incredibly high-quality horror films.

The death of the horror franchises of the eighties has largely been a matter of time.  When a series markets itself around a single iconic character - Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, Chucky, Pinhead - it automatically puts itself on a clock, tying the life of the franchise to the vitality of its antagonist.  Robert Englund did a fantastic turn as Krueger when the character debuted in A Nightmare on Elm Street, but after playing the same character for twenty years, the nearly sixty-year-old actor lacked the same sinistral energy that he had in 1984.  Doug Bradley was full of malice and sophisticated savagery in 1987's Hellraiser, but had grown so tired and unconvincing over the following two decades that he was replaced in Hellraiser: Revelations.

BH Productions, however, does not have this problem.  Its growing number of franchises are built around premises, rather than poltergeists.  Try to name Oculus' antagonist.  It's not the father: he was the first victim.  It wasn't the mother, nor the brother nor the legion lurking behind the looking glass.  It was the mirror itself.  The Purge's was society itself, not any one person.  Sure, Rhys Wakefield was the perfect gentleman butcher to antagonize the Sandin's, but he is no worse than the vast multitudes on the streets purging themselves of their vices; it could have been anyone, but just so happened to be him.  And while Sinister does have Bughuul, he's just the silent partner of the children he influences: anybody could play that sinistral mute under heavy caked makeup because he never does anything that would give him away as any one specific actor.

Unlike the increasingly charicaturish horror franchises of decades past - which view the metric of any good horror movie through its body count - Blumhouse's releases focus on unrelenting tension and internally-consistent atmosphere as their primary means of terror.  Shadows pooled in the corner of an empty room , restlessly meandering cameras stalking the protagonists and neo-Gothic set-design replace blood spatters and rusted knives that has defined the previous generation of horror.  Their slow, methodical pacing is completely out of character for a genre that has been dominated by fast cuts and jump scares for the last three decades.

Not suprisingly, BH's films have all had incredibly low body counts.  Paranormal Activity only killed off one character.  Oculus' malevolent mirror only claimed one victim.  Sinister dispatched a single family of three.  Absolutely nobody dies in The Conjuring: the Warrens and the Perrons - eleven people in all - walked away unscathed.

What's truly remarkable about Blumhouse Production's accomplishments, however, is not that they've secured A-list talent, but that they've secured the right talent for their purposes.  Like Marvel choosing Community directors Anthony and Joe Russo to helm the Nolan-esque Captain America: The Winter Soldier, they've proven that doubtful choices are often the right ones.  James Wan - who rocketed to genre fame with the intensely unsettling Saw - has helmed no less than four films for the company: Dead Silence, Insidious, Insidious: Chapter 2 and The Conjuring.  Annabelle director John Leonetti began his work at BH Productions as the cinematographer of Dead Silence, Insidious, Insidious: Chapter 2 and The Conjuring.  The consistently under-rated Ethan Hawke starred in both Sinister and The Purge while relatively unknown Patrick Wilson starred in The Conjuring, Insidious, Insidious: Chapter 2 and the upcoming The Conjuring 2: The Enfield Poltergeist.

While there are certainly great horror movies being made today outside of this one production company, no other production company has shown to be as consistently effective at the genre this century.  Their concentration of talent, effectively mounted tension and relatively low-tech scares have rapidly outpaced their splatter-gore competition.  Their brand is so effective that they have somehow turned Annabelle - a blatant Child's Play rip-off - into what I can unashamedly call the most anticipated horror film of the year.  As long as they continue to develop interesting films with their proven method, they will continue to terrify a new generation of movie-goers.

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