Malignant

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Malignant
USA/China 2021
Directed by James Wan
Warner Brothers

Wow, this is amazing. I do seem to get on really well with the output of James Wan as a director, it has to be said. Malignant is... well it’s not a horror movie like many other of this director’s films, although you wouldn’t necessarily know it until you start to figure things out as the early appearances of the film’s main antagonist are depicted in a fashion that, if you don’t know the trick, certainly appears to be coming from the canon of supernatural horror. Now, I could go into all the ins and outs of the film here but I really do owe it to Mr. Wan, after making such a good movie, to try and not let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, by putting spoilers into the review where they could be easily found.

What I will say, however, is that the film is, as far as I’m concerned, a kind of souped up reboot... okay, lets call it a 'genuine homage'... of one of my favourite all time thrillers. Now, to mention the director of that thriller would be a spoiler in itself and, to be fair to Wan, the film is a further twist on the central concept, allowing it to go in a slightly different direction... so I will say that, if you want to see which film I think was the inspiration for this one, you can find my review of it here.

Now the film itself involves a wonderful prologue featuring an, as yet, unglimpsed creature called Gabriel at the Simeon Research Hospital in 1993. This is a brutal and violent set up to give you an idea of what this dangerous creature is like. We then have a beautifully gritty montage title sequence of things which may clue you in on some important elements of the creature’s story, if you watch closely enough, before jumping to the present day and meeting the main protagonist, Madison, played by Annabelle Wallis. She’s pregnant and, after her husband beats her, she dreams of his death by supernatural antagonist... something which seems to have actually happened when she wakes and goes down to investigate, before said ‘entity’ attacks her and she wakes up in hospital, having lost the baby. We also meet her sister played by Maddie Hasson, two nicely written cops played by George Young and Michole Briana White and, a little later, another mystery character played by Jean Louisa Kelly. Actually, this last character was interesting because she works in... and is terrorised by the film’s main antagonist in... that underground city in Seattle. This is the first time I can remember it being featured in a movie since the second of the original two Carl Kolchak TV movies, The Night Strangler (the sequel to The Night Stalker, before the spin off TV series tried to ride the back of it).

Okay, that’s all I am going to say other than... the main twists in this movie are not so hard to figure out from, frankly, very early on in the movie (you’ll probably get their within 5-10 minutes of the opening credits) but that’s not a problem for me because the nature of the way that twist is revealed and explored and the way it opens up the story is wonderfully executed and still brings the odd surprise along to sweeten the deal. For example, I was aware fairly quickly that the killer was walking and running backwards but, I didn’t figure out the significance of that until the last third of the movie... which is nice. Also, my confusing the ‘mystery woman’ with the main lead at one point, made more sense once certain things were made clear (again in the last third of the movie). So yeah, colour me impressed.

Impressed too with the wonderful cinematography, frame designs and editing. James Wan has gone for a lot of shots which are accented along vertical lines but he also tends to pitch the main focus of the frame at the centre (something which I tend to think of as being a bit old school and it reminds me of something I saw British director Terence Fisher doing in a movie recently). It works perfectly here though and the way it's edited creates a nice rhythm as the shots, because of how they are framed, segue into each other without pulling the viewer onto another part of the screen in a jarring manner.

Such as a brilliant shot where the vertical gives way to the exterior of a window split into a huge grid. The camera slowly zooms in on the exterior as we see the face of one of the characters on the phone through a tiny rectangle making up one of the panes of glass in the frame. A really nice piece of cinema right there which shows just how much a master of his game Wan has become. It’s nice stuff.

What’s also nice is the music from Wan’s longtime collaborator, composer Joseph Bishara, who certainly provides a really wonderful score to this which is befitting exactly the kind of movie which I think has inspired the director. Actually, more than anything, the score to this reminded me a lot of Riz Ortolani’s score for Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture A Duckling which, frankly, is a heck of a score to be compared to. I hope that, should the composer ever read this, he takes it as a complement. It’s got a refreshingly ‘old school’ sense of experimental sound scoring which really lends itself to this incredible movie. And, as usual, Watertower records are not helping out when it comes to trying to buy the score. This thing is only available as a stupid, compressed electronic download and not as a proper CD once more, which I find really infuriating and... honestly, I just can’t type properly when I consider this music company’s crimes against filmanity.

And that’s me pretty much done with Malignant, although I will be first in line to grab a Blu Ray when this one comes out... it’s an instant classic. The film is a little on the gory side (I didn’t realise this until a friend of mine told me it was supposed to be quite violent after I recommended it to them... and I suppose it kinda is) but it’s not so over the top that it’s any more violent than a lot of movies made in the 1970s and 80s... perhaps it is a bit of a contrast to all the toned down violence we are usually familiar with at the cinema these days. Anyway... that really is all I’ve got to say now on this one. I would absolutely recommend this to fans of 1970s thrillers and, yes, even though it’s really not a horror movie, I think the target audience of that genre would also get a blast out of this one, to be honest. Don’t miss out.

Aquaman

Curry On Sea Men

Aquaman
2018 Australia/USA
Directed by James Wan
UK cinema release print.

Okay... so this was nothing like what I was expecting this movie to be. I was assuming this would be, like most of the other recent DC movies in this particular cinematic strand of continuity... something of a mess. As it is, this is easily one of the most engaging and entertaining of the DC universe films, second only to Wonder Woman (reviewed here). That being said, I can’t imagine any other superhero movie ever coming close to Wonder Woman in my lifetime so, yeah, I guess you can say I thought a lot of the new Aquaman movie, even though he really isn’t the Aquaman I used to love as a kid.

Aquaman stars Jason Momoa as Arthur Curry, the title character, reprising his role from Batman Vs Superman - Dawn Of Justice (reviewed here) and Justice League (reviewed here). He bookends the narrative with voice-over narrative telling a big story of political battles in the undersea kingdom which threaten all the non-ocean dwellers on the planet but, he comes at it through the eyes of his personal story and... this is something which hooked me in right from the start... he tells it from the angle of a love story. A love story between his dad, Tom, played by Temuera Morrison (who you might remember as Bobba Fett’s father Jango Fett, plus a bunch of clones of his character, in the prequel Star Wars movies) and his mother, Atlanna, played by Nicole Kidman.

And it’s quite charming and heart warming and from this simple, fish out of water start where Tom rescues Atlanna and cares for her in his lighthouse, I was completely hooked. There’s a wonderful action scene in said lighthouse where Nicole Kidman goes full-on warrior and bashes up a load of Atlanteans and then sacrifices her freedom to return to the oceans, leaving Tom to raise their child... who we soon see has lots of cool, undersea powers from his mother.

From then on we get two parts of the villainous plot introduced... as Black Manta, a modern pirate played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, is left hating Aquaman for reasons I won’t go into here while regular James Wan collaborator Patrick Wilson, as Aquaman’s half-brother King Orm, tries to persuade and manipulate wise King Nerreus, played by Dolph Lundgren, to raise up Atlantis, unite all the armies of the kingdoms of the oceans and wage war on the surface dwellers who have been polluting their oceans for centuries. Meanwhile, over the years, we have Orm’s advisor Vulko, played by Willem Dafoe, who has been secretly training Aquaman in his fishy ways over the years and Mera, played by Johnny Depp’s nemesis Amber Heard, reprising her role from Justice League, who wants Arthur Curry to find an ancient trident which will give him power to gain the kingship of the ocean and defeat Orm’s attempt to be Ocean Master.

So, basically, what we have is an action spectacular with a kind of road movie treasure hunt involving Aquaman and Mera, who are trying to gain the trident and avert disaster and... you know what? It’s a real fun ride.

James Wan is somebody I usually only associate with low budget, fairly high quality horror films but, it looks like he can really knock out a good, large scale action blockbuster if he’s given enough money to play with. Like Wonder Woman, the big action is matched by a very overt, emotional, beating heart which gives the audience something to invest in when the battle scenes come and this really took me by surprise since, frankly, the Aquaman character didn’t really get much of a chance to shine in Justice League. So the writers have really thought about this one and Wan has managed to pull it all together to make a very confident looking, big screen spectacle.

This is not the blond, short back and sides version of Aquaman I grew up with... reading him in his appearances in titles such as Justice League Of America and The Super Friends. I used to love the little Comic Action Heroes figure from Mego I had as a kid, despite the fact that my Uncle had squeezed it too hard one day and Aquaman’s leg would fall off whenever he went into action after that. So I was not very happy about the look of the character they’ve brought to the screen here but I really mellowed to it once I saw how well the film works. Also, there are a fair few throwbacks to those original Aquaman strips... including those little circles they used to draw to symbolise him talking to the creatures of the ocean and also, in the endgame of the picture, his old, colourful orange and ‘green gauntlets’ costume which I used to like so much.

Now, there are a couple of problems with the movie so let me just cover those here...

It’s been quoted many times over the years that ‘continuity is the hobgoblin of the small minded’. Well then call me small minded but I think story arc continuity is an important and much valued building block when fashioning a cinematic universe (or in any other kind of story medium, to be fair) and I got the feeling that if I were to sit down and re-watch Justice League right now, I’d find a couple of glaring mis-matches. However, there’s very little shout out to the former film, although it clearly takes place some time after that one and... they kind of get away with certain differences, I think.

The other problem is that it’s just too long... it kinda slumps about two thirds of the way through and the action scenes towards the end could have done with a fair amount of trimming it seems to me. Also, a more lengthy and personal fight between Orm and Aquaman may have been a little more satisfying. That being said, it didn’t detract form the sheer impact and brilliance of the film overall and I think this is definitely one of the DC films from this period which will be remembered in a positive light, providing audiences are willing to go and see it after the not so great Justice League.

But it also has a lot going for it... great acting, great story, some well choreographed action in the middle of the film and a beautiful score by Rupert Gregson-Williams, who also did such a great job on Wonder Woman. Also, it’s easily the most surreal of the contemporary DC movies, with characters riding armoured battle sharks, giant crabs and militarised crustacean people... it’s like if Salvador Dali was allowed to design the extended underwater battle from the James Bond film Thunderball (reviewed here) and did his own thing with it. Which is never going to be a bad thing.

Also, it’s got some amazing transition scenes in the movie including flashbacks which take you completely by surprise and a lovely transformation from a shot of a snow globe to the next narrative point in the story, fairly early on in the film. There’s some really nice stuff in here and I think James Wan has done a truly remarkable job cramming in all this great stuff in a compelling, visual way.

So yeah, that’s my take on Aquaman. There’s a mid post-credits scene which gives you some insight into where they might be going with a sequel and, if it does the numbers I’m hoping it does at the box office, then we should be seeing that at some point in the future (fingers crossed). If you’re, like me, wondering why the hell DC have been getting everything wrong lately other than Wonder Woman... well, wonder no more. If you decide to go and see Aquaman then you’re in for an aquatic treat. Thoroughly enjoyed this although, a quick ‘heads up’ to say that, since I saw this, I’ve found out it’s been cut under advice from the BBFC in this country... which means I’ll definitely be importing the Blu Ray from the US when it comes out, rather than buy the truncated, vandalised English version.

The Conjuring 2

Warren Piece

The Conjuring 2 - The Enfield Case
2016 USA Directed by James Wan
UK cinema release print.

With special thanks to my good friend Doctor Rob Wilson for providing the exclusive ‘behind the scenes’ pictures while The Conjuring 2 was filming last year, three of which are pictured above.

When I reviewed The Conjuring, also directed by James Wan, a few years ago... I proclaimed that it was essentially one of the all time great, classic horror films (you can read that review here). There was a spin off film about the spooky doll who featured in that film, Annabelle (review here) but this was not exactly the classic that The Conjuring was, to be fair. As far as the original film goes, though, I still believe that it’s going to be even more well thought of in, say, 40 years time, than it is now. Definitely it will be hailed and remembered as one of the all time greats of the genre... I'm pretty sure about that.

Now The Conjuring 2, which has the subtitle The Enfield Case, at least for the British public, is also not quite the classic that the first movie was and, frankly, how could it be? That being said, it certainly doesn’t stop lightening from striking twice in that it’s still a beautifully put together horror movie and it lives up to the high standards of that first outing pretty well. If you go and see this next adventure from the real life files of Ed and Lorraine Warren’s case books, played charmingly again by the wonderful duo of Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, it really won’t leave any bitter taste in your mouth and it’s a true, spiritual sequel to that first, opening movie a couple of years ago.

I had an extra reason for wanting to catch this sequel as soon as possible and so I went on the Monday night it opened in my local cinema, which is an unusual day to release a movie on over here in the UK. That reason being that the main narrative of the movie is actually set (and also shot) not very far from where I’ve been living the last 40 years. I moved to the Enfield of the story back in 1976, after surviving a mind bogglingly strange car accident, which I won’t go into here. The stuff which was happening in this film started happening a year later in 1977 and it was a bit of a local myth around town at the time. I personally didn’t hear quite so much about it because I spent two years being home schooled due to the accident I had but it was featured on a lot of TV shows at the time... the late 1970s in Enfield was the zeitgeist of the poltergeist, I guess.

The movie starts off completely differently to how I thought it would... actually picking back up with the Warrens’ not long after we left them in the last movie, when they were going to investigate a certain, extremely famous haunting which was also one of their cases. So things pick up here with a seance style session within that investigation around what many people now know as... The Amityville Horror. In fact, the set designers choose to pick up on the architectural design of the 1970s movie but, instead of seeing those big ‘eye’-conic windows from the outside, we see them from inside the house. This opening sequence which has Lorraine leaving her body and going through some disturbing visions isn’t just to remind us who the characters are, either... but I’m trying to do this without spoilers so I won’t go into too much detail here.

Once again, James Wan and his crew prove themselves to be absolute masters of this kind of genre horror movie, with long lingering shots that dwell at places where you can either see or imagine details which may or may not be important. Everything is timed pretty perfectly, which anyone who has seen some of the horror movies coming out over the last few years knows isn’t a given, and the movement of the camera combined with the slow discovery by the actors or the frantic mad dashes for escape or engagement with various evil forces, does a lot to help the director ratchet up the tension to almost unbearable levels at some points.

And, of course, one of the best ingredients of the first film is carried over into this one... in that all the human characters are really nice people who you would not wish to see any of this stuff happening to. Farmiga and Wilson excel at playing these two characters and their level of charm is completely off the scale. They portray the couple as so ‘in love’ and that really helps ground the horror film and also, of course, increases the emotional stakes. The scene where Wilson plays the guitar and imitates Elvis is such a great scene which might have slowed down the whole film in the hands of another director and editor... but presented as it is here, it does wonders for the movie. The two leads are coupled with a bunch of actors and actresses who are absolutely faultless, with special shout outs to Madison Wolfe and Frances O’ Connor, as the main troubled daughter and her mother. In fact, the whole cast manage to accurately bring to life the stresses and camaraderie that living in this particular town at this particular time was like and it really rang true for me. I remember people like this from my childhood. They even got Franka Potente in there as a sceptical researcher and it was good seeing her on screen again.

So, of course, you totally fear for them all.

Especially when the writers fling further tension at the audience in an earlyish part of the picture involving Lorraine’s vision of Ed’s death in a specific manner which you are just waiting to half happen all the way through the movie. You know there’s going to be a high stress moment coming at some point in the movie and... well... yeah, the iconography from the vision certainly comes into play at one point in the running time.

There’s one thing which I did find silly in that the girls are reported here as going to Enfield Grammar School, and it seems to have been shot there too. I know because that’s my old school and I recognised quite a lot of it. However, I should probably point out that, in real life, the girls didn’t go there because, well... it was an all boys school. So I did find that kinda curious but I guess it was done to give something with more recognition value for audiences, in terms of the name of the school and reminding the audience where the majority of the movie is set when transitioning between countries at certain points for establishing shots.

However, this is really the only thing I noticed as maybe not ringing true, well, apart from all the ridiculous, over the top stuff which is part and parcel of these kinds of films. And the movie does, of course, benefit from having another of Joseph Bishara’s marvellously effective horror scores. It’s got a slightly different tone from most of his other horror work, as did the score to the previous Conjuring movie he worked on and he really does quality and supportive work in this field. I just wish somebody would give him some other genres to work in so we can hear what else his compositional voice is capable of. Great score though and you can bet I’ll be snagging a CD when that’s released (in fact, it turns out it's only available on a proper physical format from US amazon so... head over to their website if you want a credible version of the music).

And that’s all I’ve got for this one. A generally spooky film which, although not quite as great as the first one in the series, certainly lives up to the former film’s reputation and it deserves the success it’s already garnering at the box office. Hopefully a rich box office will mean we can see Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga reprise their roles as Ed and Lorraine sooner rather than later. It’s like they were born to play these characters and I certainly want to see more of them. If you liked the first movie or even you didn’t see that one, The Conjuring 2 - The Enfield Case is well worth some of your time if you’re a horror movie afficionado. A masterful approach to the subject material and I hope James Wan also comes back for a third go with these characters.

Insidious Chapter 3

Insidious Elf, 
One of the Family

Insidious Chapter 3
2015  Canada/USA
Directed by Leigh Whannell
UK cinema release print.

My personal reactions to the Insidious films have been documented on this blog as each movie has been released. Regular readers may remember that I really didn’t think a whole lot of the first Insidious movie (reviewed here), dismissing it as mostly being a remake of the old Little Girl Lost episode of the original series of The Twilight Zone, filtered by way of Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg’s big budget reworking of elements of that story, Poltergeist, in 1982. Well put together but nothing we hadn’t seen done a fair few times before and with a disappointing last quarter of an hour or so which plunged it into teen slasher horror of the worst kind. Why I bothered seeing the sequel to this one is purely because I was curious as to how the ending of that movie could be used as a way in to the second. When I saw Insidious 2 (reviewed here) I found it to be a lot more interesting because of where the story had been left and a much stronger entry in the series.

Also, and I’m trying not to be spoilery for either that movie or this third part here, one of the more interesting characters in that second film was in a place right at the end where a sequel including this character in the circumstances she finds herself in at the end of that film would be most interesting and certainly something you wouldn’t normally see in a modern movie for a main character in a story.

As it happens, I kinda half got my wish but was initially somewhat sceptical when I found out that the third movie is, in fact, a prequel and, also, it wasn’t directed by James Wan, director of the first two films (and also the magnificent modern horror classic The Conjuring - reviewed here). However, having now seen it, I am actually grateful on a couple of counts that we’ve gone back in time a little for this one. Also, seeing that one of the producers is Oren Peli, whose Paranormal Activities franchise also time leaped back for the third movie (reviewed here) and strengthened the future films by doing so, meant that I’m not against the idea. This film might well be used for taking the franchise in a more coordinated direction in the future, I suspect. It’s also being directed by the writer of all three installments, his debut in this function, Leigh Whannel. Whannel also has a recurring role in all three films... but I’ll get to that soon enough.

So what we have here is a completely different set of characters and it involves a young girl, Quinn Brenner played by actress Stefanie Scott, who is trying to help hold everyone together in a small family unit comprising of her brother (played by Tate Berney) and her father Sean, played by Dermot Mulroney, after the death of her mother. She is quite distressed by her mother’s death (as anyone would be) and she still thinks she feels her presence trying to make contact. Desperately needing to talk to her departed parent, she seeks out the psychic investigator/medium from the first two films, Elise Rainier played by veteran actress (of 180 movies at time of writing) Lin Shaye. Now, the film is set only two years before the events in the first movie but, here, Elise has given up offering her unique services to people because of a dark phantom who tries to kill her every time she does. This is not what you would expect from the character only a short number of years before we initially met her in the first chapter and, as she slowly gets involved with trying to stop the demon who is terrorising young Quinn in a series of the usual, exploitative scare tactics inflicted on audiences in these kinds of spectacles, we are slowly revealed to the elements of her back story that initially got her there in the first place.

And this is why the film gets interesting and, frankly, does what all good genre cinema does... influencing mainstream thinking by going through the back door, hopefully. In this film, Elise is pretty much the main protagonist or, at the very least, as much of a main protagonist as Quinn Brenner, getting at least equal, probably more actually, screen time. It’s a strong, female role in a genre which has always promoted strong female roles, even as far back as some of the early 'Hammer Horrors' and it goes so much further beyond just the general whittling away of characters until you’re left with the one, final girl who becomes the strong survivor by default (a pattern even followed by Sigourney Weaver’s much celebrated character in the first Alien movie, of course). Now, on it’s own as a strong element of "gender in your genre", that’s all well and good and is probably a cause for congratulation... but that’s not the sole reason why I think this film is just a little more ready to indulge in some, almost subversive, shenanigans and why I hope the effect of this film might be able to have some slow but sure widespread influence, not just on the horror genre in general but in, hopefully, mainstream cinematic culture.

The thing is... I hope Lin Shaye doesn’t mind me saying that she’s no spring chicken. She’s 72 years old in fact. The role she is playing and how it develops and builds over the course of this film is kind of, by the end game, a psychic female action hero. When terrified by a demon in an other wordly zone (The Further), for instance, she breaks it’s grip with a head butt to the face and a bring it on kind of attitude which causes it to back down. She then proceeds to find her inner strength with a display of psychic carnage in this other plane and, mostly, wreaks havoc on her ghostly enemies like a modern, female Dr. Strange. How many other movies out there at the moment, or in a very long time for that matter, have 72 year old lady action hero’s kicking the villain’s butts? This is terrific stuff and unheard of for mainstream cinema these days... so I’m hoping that this will gradually be an influence on other horror movies, little by little, until it slips into main blockbuster cinematic syntax by a process of casual familiarity.

It’s okay to have very old, female heroes, folks... and guess what the average age of the target audience that a horror movie like the ones in the Insidious franchise are being aimed at is? Well, I don’t know but I’m pretty sure these things are being made for late teens/early twenties audiences primarily to be able to get the money back... so there’s that. Low budget horror movies usually turn a profit and this is the kind of genre where you can sneakily make this kind of change first... so something to think about there and I’m pleased with the writer for doing this.

Of course, another thing the horror genre does, by its very nature and due to an easy recognition of the visual language of the horror film, is to try and concentrate your attention away from where the scare is coming but, in a lot of cases and including this film, that also means turning the camera to places where the action is not happening and concentrating on different areas of the shot to give your mind a build up to the scare. Now, when you think about it, allowing other things in a frame to dominate over the actual action that’s going on in the rest of the shot is more of a European way of shooting a movie than something that would normally be accepted in a mainstream American piece. It’s a specific way of doing things and it’s no better or worse than any other kind of strategic visual aesthetic but I find it intriguing where the one kind of US mainstream cinema where that is encouraged is in the horror genre. I’m not saying it’s in any way a deliberate nod to a less native approach to shooting movies (and it wouldn’t have been seen to be either, up until around the late 1970s in US movie production)... it’s more just a symptom of the approach to being creative with some overly familiar genre rules at this point in the game... but it’s certainly something else which separates what you can get happening in a low budget horror movie at this time which wouldn’t be acceptable in a lot of other current commercial product.

The other nice thing about this film is the return, in the last third of the movie, of Tucker and Specs, played by Angus Simpson and the writer/director of this movie, Leigh Whannell - the two nerdy psychic investigators with their blog, 'Spectral Sightings'. It’s here we see them meet Elise for the first time and, due to events in this film, forge an alliance that will see them through to the team they have become in the first two movies and, hopefully, the quite unique team they will be in any subsequent chapters. There are some nice touches in here and, although I found some of the transition jumps in this movie a bit out of kilter with what I would have expected (and I don’t think that this was necessarily done on purpose but possibly from a lack of shots designed to be edited into a workable transition?), I think Whannell does a competent job as a director. It's maybe not quite up to the same standard as the second movie, to be sure, but it’s certainly a whole lot better than the first installment and, coupled with another winning score for the series by Joseph Bishara, with more melody being allowed to bleed into the atonality in this set of compositions than usual, then you have a pretty solid time at your local cinema if supernatural chills are your kinda thing. Still happy to go and see what they do with a fourth one on the strength of this and, frankly, the inclusion of a 72 year old lady action hero is something to be celebrated, no matter what genre it’s happening in. So maybe check this one out if horror movies are your kind of thing and, due to the chronological setting of this one, you don’t even really need to have seen the first two movies to give this one a shot. Enjoy.

Insidious: Chapter 2

Tempus Forget

Insidious: Chapter 2
2013 USA
Directed by James Wan
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Big spoilers for both Insidious movies 
waiting to pounce from another dimension as you read.

It’s funny. I seem to remember being a lot more disappointed with the first of the Insidious movies than my review here seems to show. Maybe I was being a little kinder to it than I would be nowadays. I remember being really annoyed with the last half hour when the weird “other dimension” creature showed up, turning it into a boring teen nightmare monster flick. However, I also remember being impressed enough with the execution of the on-screen scares which built up to this last half hour to the point where I guess I cut it some slack, maybe. Although, you could see the end of the movie coming a mile off.

Insidious: Chapter 2 is not, as many reviewers would have you believe, a sub-standard carbon copy of the original movie but is actually a valid sequel to the first film which, yes, truly tries to hit the same points that its fan base loved in the first one, but which does so quite validly because of the history of the events which were visited upon this same family in the first movie. I have to say that there was enough going on in the new one to keep me interested and that, although there are some pretty annoying weaknesses in this one, overall I felt a little more entertained than the first time around.

Okay, so this one starts of in a somewhat scary pre-credits sequence where we re-meet the father of the family, Josh, but as a little boy. He’s obviously having some problems with the spirit world and we also meet a younger version of the psychic, Elise, who was killed at the end of the last movie. This opening sets the story up to get back to the family in the present, one day later after the events in the first movie.

Well, Josh is still possessed, as we knew from the end of the last movie, by something which came back in his place and so most of the first half of the running time is setting up the same kinds of scares but with the audience knowing about what’s going on a lot quicker than any of the regular characters realise. The problem here is, because there’s a lot of story to cover in this one, the scares are a lot quicker to come than they were in the first movie and so there’s no real pacing involved. Scares of this kind usually need to exist in an atmosphere of lurking dread and slow build and here... it’s just not scary because the timing seems wrong and rushed. It’s like coming in straight into the third act of a horror movie without bothering to set the scene.

Another big problem with things going on here is... all anyone needs to do is take a photograph of pseudo-Josh in our dimension and all would be revealed. Just as they’d twigged in the last film. Seems like all the characters in this movie decided to have collective amnesia on that front. Bit of a shame really.

However, this movie makes up for what it lacks in scares with some interesting plot spins leading off from the first movie and, by the time you’ve got a couple of the film’s main hero characters wandering around in the afterlife guided by Elise (Lin Shaye reprising her role from the first movie) then things start to get interesting. It seems that in the realm beyond our senses, the people who dwell in this strange, halfway dimension, are able to travel in time and this kind of temporal relocation means we get to discover the other viewpoint of some of the things which went on in the first movie plus other perspectives of things which went on in the pre-credits of this movie. It’s all a bit like Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning appearing to themselves at the start of an old Doctor Who episode, to be honest, but I do like these kind of “tempus fugit” style shenanigans, truth be told, so I don’t see any fault here. The film also gives us a nice new villain and a nice new ally character, included in an arsenal of interesting characters, so that’s all good. It’s also got rid of that creepy surreal neon guy from the last bit of the first movie so... yeah, good call.

Ultimately, it’s not that effective as a scary movie and I can understand why some people are disappointed with it. I think though, it does have a lot of nice things to say about the events of the first movie and gives it a more grounded place to live in. It’s still quite surreal in places, which is a good thing, but it’s not as in your face and unsubtle at that kind of stuff as the first one and so, consequently, this film is more effective in that sense, at least.

It’s also good that even when characters are dead, they can still go running around and helping people out and the fact that, even at the end of the movie, Elise is still working with her two assistants from the first movie (although they themselves don’t even know she’s there) gives the Insidious universe a more interesting and durable texture to it than some movies in this genre have going for them. And the ending of this actually sets it up for a third installment where you just know someone has been left behind (and consequently someone bad has come back in a form we don’t know yet) and I hope a third movie gets the green light so I can see what Elise is seeing at the end of this one.

All in all, the Insidious movies put together are not half the film that the same director’s The Conjuring (reviewed here) is. If you want to see a truly creepy horror movie, go catch that one. But I can see how Insidious: Chapter 2 might win a certain following and I can certainly imagine many people would use this as a comfort film, much like they would a zombie film. It’s not the best horror movie out there, by a long shot, but it’s certainly got its own thing going for it and the performances are all great, including the always watchable Patrick Wilson as, not one, but two versions of Josh. If you liked the first movie then I think this one is worth taking a look at sometime.

The Conjuring

Conjurlingus

The Conjuring
2013 USA
Directed by James Wan
Playing at cinemas now.

Hmmm.

You know, back in the 1970s and 1980s, I used to claim that there were only, maybe, between five and ten decent horror movies ever made. Now, what I meant by that is actually, between five and ten “scary” horror movies ever made. Clearly, for example, The Bride Of Frankenstein is probably going to be on most people’s top ten horror movies but it’s probably not in any way an effective horror movie in terms of scaring anyone... unless that person is two or three years old maybe. So for when I was making that claim... I stick to my guns. There are lots of great horror films, such as Suspiria, Zombie Flesh Eaters, Night Of The Living Dead etc... but none of these movies are in any way scary.

Nowadays, however, I’d have to say my opinion has been forced to change given the influx of really well made horror films coming out in the last ten to fifteen years. Loads of films where the creeping and subtle terror, has started to make a come back in a more than competent manner. We have films that get the job done right, now, like The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, The Last Exorcism (reviewed here), Paranormal Activity 2 (reviewed here) and Paranormal Activity 3 (reviewed here) and, you know, The Blair Witch Project. Even just the last couple of years there’s been a steady increase of freshly made horrors which actually don’t fail to scare and I can probably add a lot to the likes of my original list from way back when... which included stuff like The Haunting (1963 version), The Fog (1980 version), The Shining and, tentatively, The Exorcist (The Version We’ve Already Seen). I think it’s fair to say that during the last decade or two, my list has probably doubled.

The reason I’m dredging up this stuff now is actually by way of an apology. You see, The Conjuring is actually something of a great and powerfully scary movie. That being said, though, I’ve reviewed a fair few effectively scary new movies over the past three years and so, if what I say here about this movie sounds like something of a bit of a repeat review of any of the other of the better horror movies I’ve reviewed on this blog, well I apologise.

Of course, that makes this review no less valid and the movie in question no less great.

The films is a dramatisation of the real life events of a demonic possession which plagued the Perron family back in the early seventies and the people who helped them, the real life husband and wife team of psychic investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (portrayed brilliantly in this movie by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) who, among others, investigated one case which is known to modern cinema audiences as The Amityville Horror. It’s also a very effective “scare the pants off you” movie which is not to be missed by fans of the supernatural and the unknown.

Three things distinguish this movie a little more than a lot of the other horror movies doing the rounds the past few years... the first being, of course, that we have a real life couple of protagonists who have investigated hundreds of cases which could be prepped for a sequel if this movie is successful (they are and it is, by the way... I’m expecting to see another one in a couple of years and I look forward to it greatly). So genre characters who can keep on running in a number of movies, thus filling a void left when the two movies made as extensions of the TV show The X Files turned out to be... well... a bit lame.

Another thing which make this a little different is that it’s set in a period around about 1971 (until 1973 in real life, is my understanding of events) and although there are a lot of accidental anachronisms on show for the time portrayed here, the movie generally manages to capture the spirit of this period without resorting to too much postmodernistic nostalgia... it’s not a movie about the past, in other words, it is just set in the past and this is not a ‘feature’ of the story... it is just another fact.

The other element which sets it apart is its confidence in breaking the narrative flow to put in little diversions and emphasise points with a bit of visual punctuation, so to speak, not unlike a 1960s Godard movie... although with a completely different motive. It’s also to the credit of the director in question that this never really breaks the spell of the film... merely serves to enhance little points at key moments. Also, it’s not done all over the place either. It’s a tool which is used on the odd occasion and which doesn’t outstay its welcome.

A couple of “mini past cases” from  The Warrens are highlighted, for example, one of which... involving the much loved horror film staple of “a creepy doll”... is even used to clarify certain events pertaining to the case The Warrens are working on in the main timeline of the movie in no uncertain terms (you’ll know it when you see it... Ed and Lorraine Warren are not the only people besides their assistants and The Perron Family who are placed in demonic peril... but I really don’t want to spoil it for you so I’ll say nothing of this here).

And now we come to the stuff which is possibly going to sound a bit like one or two of my other reviews... but I write this because it’s the truth. The film-makers obviously know horror movies inside out and, though I had my reservations about the last 20 minutes or so of this director’s Insidious (which turned me off that whole movie, to a certain extent), this guy certainly knows how to run almost every horror cliché in the book throughout the film’s, never overlong, running time and still get away with it. That is to say, he has honed his feel for horror cinema to the point where, even though you are expecting quite a lot of what goes down in some of the key scare sequences, they are always so beautifully and effectively executed that you really can’t find fault with them. Indeed, you don’t have time to find fault because the sequences in question, coming ready or not, will make you jump out of your skin at some points. So if you are already a jumpy person... consider yourself warned.

Also, the director is not one of these people who is inclined to keep the camera moving all over the place at high speed to make it look like it’s moving along at breakneck place but, that being said, he does tend to have a very slow shifting field of vision which gives the feeling of static master shots when, in fact, they didn’t seem to be. Very slow takes and edits seems to be the order of the day here (thank goodness) and the slight sense of motion inherent in every 24 frames of film is really hypnotic and helps to draw you into that all important atmosphere of terror the crew is trying hard to create here.

And it works really well. Right down to Joseph Bishara’s original score which really supports the film well and which I have to wait a month to arrive on CD because, for some reason I can’t fathom, it’s only available from US Amazon and not the UK Amazon. Go figure. So I can’t tell you as yet what it’s like as a stand alone listen but it’s really effective in the movie and I’m sure it will scare me loads when I finally get around to listening to it. Certainly goes for a mood of terror and unease and gets it right all the way.

The one thing this movie really has going for it though, right throughout the entire movie, is that all the human characters (and by that I mean, people who aren’t dead and are ghostly or demonic spirits) are completely likeable characters who you really wouldn’t mind hanging around with at a pub and who really promote a certain, solid set of loving family values. And of course, this makes the spiritual and deadly attacks on them even more frightening. You care about all of these characters... so you’re invested in them right from the outset.

And of course, the actors portraying all of these people are just great in their roles. There’s honestly not a bad turn among them. These are skilled craftsmen and craftswomen who, along with the rest of the crew, have come together to make a horror movie which will literally, for want of a more eloquent term, “scare you up good”. And it’s to their credit that, in The Conjuring, they do just that. If you call yourself a fan of horror cinema then, although it might all seem a little overfamiliar perhaps, you really ought to go and see this movie and have some kind of opinion of it... good or bad. I had a lot of fun with this one... and so did the packed out audience I saw it with, if the jumps and screams are anything to go by.