Insidious - Out Of The Further

The Further Adventures...

Insidious - Out Of The Further
Directed by Jacob Chase
Australia/USA 2026
Blumhouse
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Okay then... another Insidious movie, namely Insidious - Out Of The Further and, well, it’s actually quite good in many respects, even though the franchise is now pretty much divorced from its original creator other than a production credit. Which means, of course, that Elise’s two assistants from the previous movies are no longer with us. 

But, hey, Elise is... as played by the 83 year old Lin Shaye and, yeah, that actress is still kicking ass in this movie. Elise is still dead, of course... but as usual, she’s helping out people from her unique place in The Further, the realm between life and death where the evil entities that plague the various corporeal, human inhabitants of these films live. And, since her two regular helpers are not in this installment (she’s the only character/actress to appear in all six movies to date), we’re introduced to a new, physical world helper in the form of Clare, played by Maisie Richardson-Sellers... and she’s a likeable enough character and the actress does a good job on selling her here, even though she’s really only brought in for the last third of the movie.

Okay, so this film focuses on a new family, three generations of daughters headed up by main protagonist Gemma (played by Amelia Eve), her daughter Maya (played incredibly well by Island Austin) and her own mother Ingrid (played by Laura Gordon). We initially see Ingrid die in a violent fashion in front of the young version of Gemma in the past. This is followed by the usual, big Insidious title coming up with the ferocious, atonal music accompanying it but, either my cinema had rubbish sound or it was pretty dialled back this time around. It didn’t startle me like they usually, quite purposefully do. 

And if I had a criticism of this film in general it’s that it does go through all the usual tricks of the trade of the modern horror film, like showing you where you think the scare is going to come from or shifting the audio landscape to not-quite-subconsciously herald in another intense scene... but it somehow manages to be completely unscary this time around. I don’t think it’s me but... this film did feel somehow less stressful than any of the other movies in the franchise and... I wonder if that’s down to the director over anything else? 

There are, though, some unsettling moments for a certain sector of the audience, I reckon... Gemma grows up to be a dentist and there is a full on ‘dental horror’ scene in this. It wasn’t particularly scary for me but it was inventive in what it reveals about one of the characters. I could see how it might set some people’s teeth on edge if they have a quite understandable fear of dentistry (I’m personally in a good spot with my dentist these days so... maybe that’s why I found it less distressing). 

My second criticism took the form of an homage scene and, my problem is it didn’t go far enough. So you remember the eye slowly being pulled towards a big, sharp splinter and then being gouged out in Zombi (aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters, reviewed here)? Well, a similar scene but using a much cleaner, sharper instrument is restaged here in reference... except the director seems to have an eye on the censors and it doesn’t quite get to the eye gouging. But that would have been nice to see in a modern movie, for sure... especially since the victim is also the main protagonist here. That would have really shocked the audience if she’d lost an eye and helped build the kind of ‘the gloves are off’ momentum that the film needed.

But. like I said, the film is pretty entertaining and a fair bit better than Insidious - The Red Door (reviewed here), especially because Lin Shaye has more of a role this time around. 

And that’s me done with Insidious - Out Of The Further. I thought this was a fine addition to the franchise and, I think if fans give it a chance, they should be into it too. It does open up a possibility of having sequels that are not just centred around the same family from the first five movies and I thought it did that in a more than credible manner. I just wish the scares could have been ramped up a notch. Oh, and stay for the mid credits scene and especially because, during those credits, you can hear in more detail something that composer Joseph Bishara does in the movie too... which is go into the realms of John Carpenter style scoring, specifically The Fog, at some points. So that’s cool too. 

Insidious - The Red Door

Further More

Insidious -
The Red Door
Directed by Patrick Wilson
Canada/USA  2023 Screen Gems
UK cinema release print

Okay, so despite the first movie in the series being yet another ‘inspired by but not owning up to it’ reworking of the Little Girl Lost episode of The Twilight Zone, I do quite like the Insidious movies and have been happy to go see each one as they hit the cinemas. So now we’re up to the fifth chapter in the ongoing series, Insidious - The Red Door. This one is mostly not written by Leigh Whannell as far as I can tell (the IMDB seems a bit conflicted with this information in a couple of different sections) but he does still do a cameo as his character from the previous movies in this, as does both his ghostbusting partner Angus Simpson and, in two big cameo spots, Lin Shaye... who I was hoping would have a much bigger role in it this time around.

This movie is set nine years after the events of the first film and features the main male lead Patrick Wilson (who also directed this installment as his debut behind the camera) as Josh and, now college aged but still played by the original actor who was a boy in the first couple of films, Ty Simpkins as his son Dalton (his brother is played by Andrew Astor, who also reprises his role for this movie). Then we have Rose Byrne back as Josh’s ‘now ex’ wife and a newcomer in the form of Dalton’s new college buddy/potential girlfriend played by Sinclair Daniel.

This one sees a rift has developed between father and son in the years since they were both hypnotised to forget their involvement and terrifying experiences in The Further, the parallel realm to this one which haunts them in both their corporeal forms and their astral explorer forms. Both are plagued by visions with their suppressed memories starting to break loose and manifest new horrors upon them... with the film following the two individually as they fail to connect in real life, until they are rebonded accidentally in the next ‘scary movie encounter’ in The Further, linking them right back to their earlier experiences.

And it’s an okay film. It’s not the best in the franchise for sure and, I think I find it somewhat lacking in terms of story more than anything else. Patrick Wilson proves himself a very good director, working with the material he’s been given and I was especially impressed by a scene where nothing much happens but the whirs and clicks of an old microfiche reader (I’ve never heard one make those sounds) are used to punctuate jump cuts as the camera is repositioned a little closer to him and his subject matter at each click.

And it’s got some good enough jump scares in the movie too. Once more, it’s all about what the audience sees and expects which dictates the way the camera points, often calling to attention differences in shots of familiar terrain. So the audience can see a door has been opened between shots where the character can’t for instance... or the presence of a man behind a truly contrived presentation of a classic memory game is getting closer each time Josh uncovers a panel of a set of windows. So, yeah, in some ways the film is predictable about when the scares are going to come... and how they’re going to come (I didn’t expect full on face vomiting in this one, for sure) but it doesn’t really stop the jumps being fairly successful and, with Joseph Bishara’s typical score to back up the film, it all works pretty well.

I have three main disappointments with the film though, which I’ll briefly elaborate here. One is that the endless array of scary set pieces don’t follow a particularly complex or interesting narrative. If you’ve seen the previous installments, you’ll know what’s going on and there’s not much story development in this one, it has to be said. So I did find it a kind of an empty bunch of scary moments in a bag, ultimately.

Secondly, after Lin Shaye’s character Elise’s death in the second one (plus her wonderful, much more leading roles in the two prequels), I was hoping she would be back in a big way. We know she’s in The Further (as this film reminds us) so I was hoping for a series of movies where she and her two ghostbusting co-workers would be working a horror mystery from each dimension, communicating through some kind of link. Instead, the three characters really are just cameos so... yeah... that was a shame.

Thirdly, there’s a truly great new character, an art teacher called Professor Armagan, played by Hiam Abbass. It’s set up like she’s going to be a new mentor character in place of the deceased Elise (or at least that's what it seemed like to me) and the actress herself has amazing screen presence in this role. Alas, both actress and character are wasted in here, in what amounts to just a couple of scenes. I think the writer should have done more with this character.

Other than those slight grumbles though, yeah, if you like the previous Insidious movies then Insidious - The Red Door should give you another good time at the cinema. As I type this, the news has come in that it’s beaten the new Indiana Jones movie (reviewed here) at the box office and, yeah, I think a lot of people (myself included) are in shock that Indy didn’t do a lot better. All I will say is that, despite there only being seven people in this screening (so I don’t know how it managed to snag the figures it has), I’m guessing that this one is appealing to a younger target audience than Mr. Jones. And, I suspect, that’s the generation that, rightly or wrongly, are much less frightened about going out and catching Covid from a cinema trip. So maybe those box office figures aren’t such a large surprise after all.

Malignant

Back To Front

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.

Annabelle Comes Home

Dolly Go Lightly

Annabelle Comes Home
USA 2019 Directed by Gary Dauberman
UK cinema release print

Annabelle Comes Home is the seventh of the movies set in The Conjuring universe and for the most part, these have been successful films (I’m not talking about box office here, although that’s been good for them too on most of these, is my understanding). This one is the third of what had been a series of stand alone spin offs featuring the Annabelle doll from The Conjuring but this one also has the added bonus of having opening and closing sequences featuring Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga reprising their roles as Ed and Lorraine Warren. Lorraine Warren passed away earlier in the year and there’s a nice little ‘In Memorium’ type statement at the end of the film before the end credits roll.

In terms of the doll centred films in general, I’m going to start off by saying that this is not as bad as the first prequel, Annabelle (reviewed here) but by no means as good as the second prequel to that prequel, Anabelle Creation (reviewed here). This one, though, is set after both of those films and starts off with the Warrens bringing the doll back to their house so they can put it in a glass case and keep the evil contained. So it’s kind of set before the bits of The Conjuring where the Annabelle doll gets out near the end and this is a whole ‘adventure’ involving the doll that somehow wasn’t mentioned in those earlier movies. So wedged in between the various installments, it kinda doesn’t help that the main protagonist of this film, Lorraine Warren’s young daughter Judy, is played by somebody totally different... a young actress called Mckenna Grace. Not that she doesn’t do a great job... it’s just confusing but, with the way child actors' faces change so quickly, probably a necessity of setting this one back a bit before the events of some of the other films.

Grace is ably supported by two other teenage antagonists played by Madison Iseman and Katie Sarife as Judy’s babysitters while the Warrens are away for an evening and if you’re thinking that this movie seems overly teenage oriented for a franchise that has, with the two main movies at least, proved to be a mature, well made series of horror films... you’d be right. This is kind of a ‘Conjuring light’ movie and the plot revolves around something which we’ve seen since the opening of the very first movie in the sequence, the Warren’s ‘trophy room’. The writers have always made it clear that the things in this room should not be disturbed in any way lest the 'evil spirits' within return to their demonic ways so, of course, this is a film about what happens when one of the three protagonists goes on a rampage of curiosity within the forbidden room and lets out, not just the Annabelle doll but a load of other nasty characters too... since the Annabelle is known for being a conduit for all things demonic.

So, yeah, spooky things are afoot and it would be remiss of me not to mention that this movie does feel a lot less like an Annabelle movie and more like Nancy Drew Meets The Conjuring. However, saying that, it’s still very good at laying on the unbearable suspense and not always so obvious jump scares which, frankly, makes it a lot more scarier than some of the other movies I’ve seen at the cinema lately (cough... Midsommar... cough... In Fabric).

In fact, right from the opening ‘mini-adventure’ involving Ed and Lorraine Warren trying to drive the Annabelle doll home before she can kill them, we have the director deliberately playing with the conventions of the horror movie format by setting up not one but two view obscuring moments which he completely doesn’t use to deliver the obvious shock moments. They follow on from each other very quickly and the first of these is when Ed pops the bonnet of his car, thus obscuring what’s going on behind the windscreen from inside, where Lorraine is seated. Straight after, Lorraine opens up a large map of the area which completely blocks out our view of her side window. So, the director already knows we are expecting at least one of these two things to be hiding a jump scare and cleverly skips these... only revealing a cast of spirits from one of the views when we already know what’s happening out there.

Later on, when the film gets into full flow, the usual horror movie rules apply, where things are consistently obscured from the camera or deliberately used to foreshadow action which doesn’t actually come from the usual, on screen sources... and it’s a nice touch which shows that the film makers are at least thinking about the way an audience can second guess where the scares are coming from and, in this way at least, the film is consistent with the two main Conjuring titled movies. So yeah, one of the strong points of these films is that they respect the audience’s knowledge of the visual and audio semantics of the horror movie enough to be able to play around with things from time to time.

Another nice thing was the appearance of the brand of rag doll which was the actual Annabelle doll from the real life case make another minor cameo in this film. I think this has happened at least twice now.

Joseph Bishara’s score is, of course, another strong element of the film and it’s another case of a modern horror film giving us some effective and listenable scoring which isn’t just about extensions of the sound design. Alas, so far there’s only a stupid electronic download of the thing but if ever a CD comes out, I’ll be first in line to buy it. In fact, if a CD doesn’t come out then it will be the first movie in The Conjuring universe to not have one... so I really hope they don’t go the Marvel route with this by not releasing ‘much wanted’ CDs for some of the films.

Ultimately, as I’ve possibly oversold here earlier, the film is like a crazy fun house ride for kids in terms of the mix of teenagers with a whole load of different demonic entities after them but it does, at least, introduce us to some characters which I feel would be nicely explored in other spin offs. The spirit from the last movie in the series, The Curse Of La Llorona (which I reviewed here) makes a brief, fleeting appearance near the very start of the movie but, alas, there’s no reference to The Nun that I could easily spot. However, I think promising characters like a spooky ferryman demon, a killer bride and a big, ferocious werewolf spirit could be happily explored in future spin offs and, I suspect, be more effectively used than they were able to be in a movie which was trying to cram them all in together before we’ve already met them all properly.

At the end of the day, if you loved The Conjuring movies and the Annabelle spin offs then you should have a good time with Annabelle Comes Home. It’s not exactly intense horror but it did procure some screams from the audience I saw it with and fans of the genre in general shouldn’t have too much of a bad time with it. Not an essential watch but if you’re a fan of the cinematic incarnation of The Warrens then you should probably give this one some of your time. 

The Curse Of La Lllorona

La Llo Land

The Curse Of La Lllorona
2019 USA Directed by Michael Chaves
UK cinema release print.

There came a point in The Curse Of La Llorona, which I saw a couple of weeks early due to a preview screening in my home town, where I saw one of the actors playing a priest and thought to myself, he always plays this kind of role. Well, when the actor, Tony Amendola, returns a little later on in the film he brings with him a reference cameo of an iconic figure from four other films and it made me realise, Amendola was playing exactly the same character he played in one of those movies. That is to say, although it’s a small cameo from a demon haunted artefact and, specifically for this other object, totally in flash back, it’s made quite clear that this film is firmly part of The Conjuring universe.  Specifically, if peripherally in this case, linked in to The Conjuring (reviewed here), The Conjuring 2 - The Enfield Case (reviewed here), Annabelle (reviewed here), Annabelle Creation (reviewed here) and The Nun (reviewed here).

So, given the track record of these previous linked movies (the only one I didn’t like too well was the first Annabelle stand alone), it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise to find that this new movie is actually pretty well put together. I mean, yes it’s very clichéd and there’s nothing that’s really going to take you by surprise... story wise at least, it has the occasional okay jump scare... but this is one of those films where the timing of the scares and build ups to those with all the creeping dread going full on is actually handled pretty effectively.

There’s some nice photography in this including, after the initial plot set up, a really amazing, high speed moving camera powerhouse of a shot introducing the main protagonist of the film, played by the wonderful Linda Cardellini (who played my favourite character in Avengers - Age Of Ultron) as she gets her daughter and son ready for school. It’s a frenetically paced shot and it must have been well rehearsed to get everybody caught at various points in the sequence with the right timing and I really appreciated it. There’s a lot of smooth movement and a lot of static shot sequences filling the screen at various points. Alas, there is quite a lot of telegraphing via the camerawork in the film also... you kind of know that, when things shift into hand held territory (and when there’s a different, almost inaudible background bass ambient sound suddenly faded onto the foley), something pretty scary is about to happen. But, like I said, it’s all done very competently and works pretty well for what it’s supposed to be achieving.

I mentioned the children in that last paragraph as this is what the film focusses on as the objective of the supernatural entity known as La Llorona, who comes from a Mexican folktale and is apparently pretty well known outside of the story elements of this movie. A weeping woman who comes after the children to help replace or make amends for her own two children, who she drowned in an act of jealousy centuries ago. She also, in this version of the myth and, obviously, to make the film both more exciting and to give story follow through on certain dramatic elements of the plot, burns your flesh when she touches you.

The set up of this one is that, once she has taken the children of Cardellini’s neighbour, played here by beautiful model and actress Patricia Velasquez (you may remember her as Anck Su Namun in The Mummy movies), in an uncharacteristically unglamorous role, La Llorona turns her attention to Cardellini’s children, for reasons which I won’t spoil here but, there’s a definitive story beat revealed much later in the film as to why this is happening to her children specifically. We also have another cliché of a character in the outsider shamen who turned his back on the church who can help exorcise La Llorona using his ‘questionable methods’, played here with much charisma (in a kind of negative charisma kind of way) by Raymond Cruz. I actually liked this character so much that I’m now hoping he will return in one of the other Conjuring related movies at some point but, I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

The other big star of the movie is, of course, Joseph Bishara’s fantastic score which hits all the usual, atonally distressed horror points you would want in such a movie. It provides a good deal of the jittery atmosphere during the key scare sequences and I’m looking forward to hearing this in isolation away from the film (thanks to the powers that be for putting this one out on CD, even if you can only get it as an ‘on demand’ CD from American Amazon... still keeping my fingers crossed we’ll get a CD release for Insidious - The Last Key at some point).

And that’s... a very short review but there’s not much more to say other than The Curse Of La Llorona utilises the usual camera tricks of things seen at the periphery of the screen to make it more frightening so... yeah, that modus operandi is still very much in practice here. One thing I might add would be that the special effects are quite well done and, in this case, the inevitable demise of the demonic presence is, actually, quite spectacular (it would be true to say that she gets a bit cross) and, in a way, harkens back to the old days when Hammer Horror were churning out Dracula movies. So, yeah, not much else to add other than... it’s a solid, modern horror movie which will best be enjoyed by fans of the same. Looks and sounds pretty good with some believable performances from all involved. Go take a look if this genre is your thing.

Insidious - The Last Key (Insidious 4)

Insidiouself At home

Insidious - The Last Key (Insidious 4)
2018 USA/Canada Directed by Adam Robitel
UK cinema release print.

I’ve quite enjoyed the Insidious movies as they’ve been released into cinemas so far. Starting with the weakest and least compelling of the series, the original Insidious (reviewed here) was more or less an expansion/remake of the old Little Girl Lost episode of The Twilight Zone. However, both Insidious Chapter 2 (reviewed here) and Insidious Chapter 3 (reviewed here), just like The Purge franchise, took ideas from the concept pitched in that first installment and created much more enthralling and entertaining pictures out of them.

Now one of the important things about what those sequels came to be and what they are, thankfully, continuing to be in the prequel movies (parts 3 and 4) is something which I pointed out in my last review from the series and its something horror seems to do better than certain other genres... change peoples attitudes to what it's possible to portray and get accepted in mainstream movies, by stealth. And by that I mean that what we have in these last couple of films is not just a female action hero carrying the main protagonist role (which is no mean feat by itself) but, also, a 75 year old female action hero (in the form of Lin Shaye as Elise Rainier)  who is wandering around banishing demons and generally getting thrown around by them in a Marvel comics kind of way. I honestly applaud and support these films for this... where else in Hollywood are they giving action roles to heroines who are living past their seventh decade?  So yeah, I wish these films well.

Now, the bad news for me was that this was another prequel to the first two movies, being set chronologically in between the first prequel, Insidious Chapter 3 and the very first Insidious. In fact, this one is set just weeks/days before the events of original film, at the point where Elise enters the narrative of that particular supernatural adventure. Now I was hoping that this installment would finally be a sequel to the end of the second Insidious movie, where the now dead Elise is still looking after her two sidekicks in the form of Specs and Tucker (played in this one again by the film’s writer Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson) from the other side of the spiritual realm known in this series as ‘the further’ and sees something there so terrifying that we need to know who she’s seen.  Alas, the answer to that one is not tackled here, either but, at least the film does take us right up to the first one chronologically so, who knows, if this one does well enough at the box office (it certainly deserves to) then hopefully the writers will have nowhere left to go other than carrying on from that moment in time at the end of the second.

Either way, this is another strong entry in the series which, although I didn’t prefer it as much as the previous two, still entertains and brings the scares when it needs to... not so many scares, for sure but, when it gets those shock moments right, it really manages to get the jump on the audience. Actually, I found it amusing from the chuckles of anticipation and the pent up tension in the auditorium of the screening I went to, mostly from teenage couples, that the horror film is still very much, in some ways, a kind of ‘rites of passage’ experience. I could almost see the hormones bubbling up in some of the couples sitting in my nearest proximity.

So the film starts off with an extended flashback into Elise’s childhood and we begin to see, in this and other flashbacks and, also, in those moments where adventures in ‘the further’ overlap in shifting time zones, how Elise came to be the person she is at the time of this story. We learn just what kind of burden she carries around with her, too... as we meet her family at various points in time. It’s also a nice bit of writing that some of the revelations we find out about Elise’s past are also news to her and we see how she reacts to these reveals as we respond to them ourselves.

The movie goes gets straight to the point with all the supernatural stuff here and, although there are the obvious suspenseful, drawn out scenes of lurking dread in the mix, there is no slow build up reveal to the first presence of the ghostly apparitions and, although this approach maybe shouldn’t work so well, the director seems to really get away with it very well here. It's very rapidly paced and there’s a lot crammed in. Even some of the editing is judicious with short cuts like watching Elise walk through a door in relative close up, towards the camera and then, in the next master shot, cutting to her already being halfway through the next room. It’s something which, perhaps, should seem a little out of place here, when timing in these kinds of films is a crucial element but... nope... it all works quite well and the frights don’t lose too much impact in the scenes which matter in terms of jump scares.

There’s a wonderful sequence where Elise is going through a ventilator shaft (much like Dallas in the first of Ridley Scott’s ALIEN films) and she finds her way blocked in a couple of sections by piles of suitcases. As she goes through each pile, unlocking and opening as she goes, she finds sinister contents I won't reveal here and, as she does so, we are made aware of the old ‘sinister demonic ghost's point of view’ approaching one of the suitcase from behind. Each time Elise has a case lid up, shielding her view of the rest of the shaft in front of her, the ‘ghost camera’ saunters up from behind the lid and, as we cut back to Elise closing it, we assume that something is going to be there with her as she shuts the lid to reveal it and... each time she does it, nothing is revealed. And then, after a few of these cases, we get the expected jump scare but, because the director has deftly used the old clichéd horror syntax of manipulating expectations through shot movement, the audience is effectively blinded by those expectations of just where that ‘attack’ is going to come from. So, yeah, there’s some nice stuff happening here.

We also get a possible set up for a worthy successor to Elise and, it will be interesting to see whether, if they do decide to pick up the hanging thread from the end of the second movie, they bring back this character introduced here to act as the ‘conduit person’ between Elise in ‘the further’ and the real world. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s exactly what this character’s function is here, if the writer and producers are thinking far enough ahead.

As far as bad stuff here... well, two things really.

Once again, composer Joseph Bishara provides an appropriate though somehow more restrained musical score for the film but what he doesn’t do is give it the signature, scare the hell out of everyone, extended dissonance on the revelation of the film’s title at both the start and end of the movie as the previous installments did. This was always part of the fun and I don’t know why the decision was made to not do that this time when it’s become an established part of scoring these films.

Similarly, in terms of continuity... why is this not considered Insidious Chapter Four? While Insidious - The Last Key is an okay title and makes some reference to some truly, nicely surreal uses of keys in this film... it feels almost like the people behind the scenes are bailing out of the timeline they set up in the previous three somehow. Even though it’s certainly evident that this film finds a perfect fit in its place within the series. I don’t understand why that decision was made.

Still, those are my only real complaints and although, as I said, I didn’t quite think this one as strong as the previous two, Insidious - The Last Key is still a great ride for fans of the horror genre and, if you like the Insidious films anyway, surely not one to be missed. Plus, like I said earlier, this film has a main protagonist who is a 75 year old woman... go support this stuff so we can see more films with this option on the table. Send Hollywood that message by plonking down your pennies on stuff like this... I’m glad I did.

The Other Side Of The Door

The Monkey’s Door

The Other Side Of The Door
2016 India/UK
Directed by  Johannes Roberts
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah, there are probably what could be
considered some very slight spoilers, for some, here.

When I first saw the trailer for The Other Side Of The Door a few weeks ago, it looked to me like just another in a long line of reworkings of W. W. Jacobs famous tale The Monkey’ Paw and, yeah... that’s pretty much on the nose as to what it is. Of course, it’s not like a lot of the other various 'labelled' movie and TV adaptations of this story over the years in that it goes very quickly past the last act of that tale as, I guess, you would expect it to in this day and age. This film does, though, exactly what I expected it to do... dispensed with the three wishes part of the tale and found a different means to bring the dead son back to... well not quite life... back to the undead, I guess.

The film replaces the monkey’s paw with a magic temple in India and, after a strong pre-credits moment when a girl on a beach turns out to be... something else... we have a fairly long ramble until we get to the point where the mother, after a failed suicide attempt, is tempted to bring her dead son back from the dead... by going to the temple. The rulebook on this one is that you scatter the ashes of your loved one outside the temple, where death and life meet, and lock yourself in. You will then, in the night, be able to speak to your deceased relative but, no matter how much they plead, you must never open the door to let them inside. So, yeah, the rule books are always thrown out the window in these kinds movies otherwise you’d have no story progression and this one is no exception.

Now, the film is fairly well made in some ways... the tension in certain sections is nicely ratcheted up and the director has a penchant for using any verticals he can find... trees, columns, fencing and even the corners of a four poster bed... using them to split the screen up into sections for the actors to play in. So there was definitely some nice stuff going on here but... and it’s a big but... while the atmosphere in some sequences works well, in other parts of the movie it tends to fall flat on its face.

For instance when the, at this point invisible, ghost son wants a story read to him in bed, a book drops off the shelf, the lights go on and a chair is invisibly pushed into place... and the movie completely loses any power it had to be creepy or eerie in these moments. Maybe it’s the suddenness and speed at which these incidents occur that was the problem but any slow build up to these moments are pretty much lost at these kinds of points in the film. It’s too well lit, it’s too fast and it’s downright comical in some places, it has to be said.

Another thing that seems a bit 'off' in this film is the timings of some of the shots. There are plenty of moments in this movie where the director is trying to scare the pants off you via jump scare tactics and, yes, he uses all the clichéd set ups you would expect in a horror movie, good or bad. I have no problem with the film taking the obvious route in these kinds of situations because, done well they can really work. The trouble here, though, is that they aren’t done that well in a lot of places... some of them work and have the desired effect but at other times, not so well. For instance, there’s a transition moment from one quiet scene to another where the shot starts with a large flock of birds taking flight, loudly on the soundtrack. Now that’s obviously supposed to be a big scare moment but... yeah, it just doesn’t work. The timing is all wrong it seems to me... can't quite explain it but maybe the editing lingered just a beat or two too long to get the required jump. Usually this kinda thing works on me... and it did in some of the other parts of this movie... but here, nothing.

One of the big saving graces of the movie, apart from some beautiful scenic shots of India and the performances by Sarah Wayne Callies, Jeremy Sisto and Suchitra Pillai as the mother, the father and the wise housekeeper, is Joseph Bishara’s score to the movie. It’s nicely unsettling and this, at least, goes a lot of the way to supplying or bolstering the required tension in certain sequences. Of course, this composer has a particularly good track record in composing for horror scores, with his three Insidious scores (movies reviewed here,  here and here) and his scary sci-fi score to Dark Skies (movie reviewed here), which is a pseudo horror film in itself. He’s a composer who I feel really raises the stakes when he works on one of these things and this movie is no exception. I’m hoping this one will at least get a CD release somewhere down the line so I can hear it divorced from its context. Bishara does this stuff pretty well.

However, all the music, beautiful photography and fine performances in the world can’t stop The Other Side Of The Door being as obvious and light weight as it is as a horror film. I think the editing on this one might have helped enormously if it was drastically trimmed in places but, asides from not quite working on some of the jump scares, it also feels a little bloated in places and uneven in pacing in certain areas. Also, I’m pretty sure most people watching will see the very last scene of the movie coming way before it happens. It’s a well done moment but... totally expected and, although clichés like this can work, I think using it here just feels like a final slap in the face. I would imagine if you’re a young teen and you’ve not seen these kinds of horror movies before then you might find yourself surprised and, possibly, even frightened in places on this one but, for the majority... no. I reckon seasoned horror fans certainly won’t find an awful lot to get their teeth into here either. A really nice try but... just not enough subtlety or tension, I suspect. Perhaps don’t necessarily be tempted to look beyond the other side of the door of your local cinema screen if there are other films you want to see out there at the moment. You’ve been warned.

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.

Annabelle

Adoradoll

Annabelle
2014  USA
Directed by John R. Leonetti
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Ever so slight spoilers on some of 
the scares but not really story spoilers as such.

Annabelle is a prequel made in the wake of the popularity of the film, based on a real life tale of demonic possession investigated by The Warrens, Ed and Lorraine, called The Conjuring (reviewed here). Although the doll, known as Annabelle, does have some part to play in the opening of The Conjuring (as a scene setter for the central characters) and final parts of the former movie, Annabelle is never really anything than a scary bonus which has nothing to do with the basic plot of that film.

While the makers of The Conjuring are in the midst of trying to get a sequel churned out, possibly involving the Enfield Poltergeist (although I’m told The Warrens didn’t have a heck of a lot to do with that particular case), New Line have decided to throw this film out in the meantime to strike the box office coffers while the iron is hot, so to speak. So this film is based on the story of Annabelle before she came into the final possession of Ed and Lorraine, although the producers have gone to some lengths to connect it to The Conjuring by using Ed’s voice and a replay of some of the early scenes from the first film pertaining to the misadventures of the doll... again, to set the tone at the start of this new movie.

Now, if you’ve read my review of The Conjuring, you’ll know I absolutely loved it and proclaimed it among the best horror movies ever made.. for a number of reasons. So I was kinda looking forward to seeing Annabelle until I started hearing very low key things about it not being very good. In fact, all the tweets and reviews I read on it, bar one, said that it was a pretty dreadful film. The one good review I read started with the admission that the reviewer in question never really like The Conjuring all that much and so I figured I might be setting myself up for a fall looking forward to this prequel.

As it turns out, Annabelle isn’t a terrible film, on the face of it. It’s clichéd, for sure, but then again so are most horror movies that are all playing with a similar set of rules and this movie certainly had a fair few scenes which are going to make viewers, at the very least, a little anxious.

One of the strengths of the first movie is that pretty much all the cast were likeable and someone you felt you could hang out with. Certainly, the lead protagonists of Annabelle, a newly pregnant wife called Mia (played by Annabelle Wallis) and her husband John (played by Ward Horton) are pictured as very nice people to be with... although they don’t seem to have the same kind of appeal as the characters in the first movie and the film possibly doesn’t take enough time to explore their personalities. Things start to go wrong for them not so much later after John buys Mia, a doll collector, a hard to get piece for her collection... yeah, that’s right, the Annabelle of the title. Pretty soon after that, Mia and John’s nice n’ comfy next door neighbours get a visitation from a formerly missing daughter and her culty boyfriend. They’ve come home to slash her mum and dad to tiny pieces and then, once they’ve seen to that, they come for Mia and John. The daughter is from a satanic cult (we know as much because of the news broadcast in the background in a scene prior to these events which is pushing the Manson Murders as being a current thing) and she dies at the hands of the police but, not before she’s dripped some of her blood into the eyes of the Annabelle doll. Our heroes don’t escape unscathed but, after enough bizarre visitations by scary occurrences, our two main protagonists move to another town and start again, leaving the troublesome doll behind in a trash can.

Things start to happen not long after the Annabelle doll turns up in their new house again and Mia, and her new daughter, ar both targeted by the usual manifestations you get in these kinds of movies. It’s all done very competently and some sequences will make you jump, I suspect. That being said, there doesn’ seem to be much new on offer here and there are a lot of big scripting signposts which point to future events in the movie in several places. Like the family befriending both the local priest with an expertise on evil (evil, I tells ya) and the lady who runs the second hand bookshop... who also happens to be knowledgable about demonology etc. Most of the time it’s pretty obvious what roles these people are going to play in the movie so I can understand why people have been expecting more from this one. That being said, from the swooping and luxurious camerawork and the jump/cut/scare editing (which does need split second timing, to be fair) to Joseph Bishara’s usual sound design versus melody scoring style, in which he already seems to be getting an old hand but which does what it does when it needs to... this film is, at the very least, competently put together and should give a fair few of you something like a good time at the cinema.

There’s some really nice stuff going on too.

Annabelle herself, for example, is a classic piece of audience driven suspense in that, apart from when she’s being manipulated by someone or something else, she doesn’t once move by herself. The camera quite often holds shot on her in a close up of her face because the director knows you are waiting for the doll to either move her eyes or perhaps just blink at some point. But that jump scare never comes and this means the director can keep delivering certain, suspenseful close ups of the doll (and don’t worry, he does) while simultaneously playing on our imagination to provide the scares and, like most directors working in this genre, Leonetti knows that our imagination is often stronger than anything he can conjure up for a movie like this.

There’s a brilliant sequence about two thirds of the way through where the writer and director appear to break their own rules about the doll, which you may have already twigged isn’t going to be doing anything on her own, by now. As Mia is in deep focus and facing out to the audience in the foreground of a shot, we notice the Annabelle doll getting up on her own as Mia then turns to stare at it. The doll begins to appear to levitate and it’s only after a little more of this that both the audience and Mia come to realise that, through the sheer chicanery of movie effects and editing, something is actually holding the doll up, back there in the darkness. Scary stuff.

There’s a nice Rosemary’s Baby kind of vibe going through the movie too. Not in terms of Mia and John’s child so much, although Mia is an obvious reference by the writer, Gary Dauberman, name checking the actress who portrayed Rosemary in the movie version of Ira Levin’s famous novel... Mia Farrow. The similarity is more in terms of atmosphere and the apartment block that Mia finds herself inhabiting mostly on her own when John is away at work. You also get the feeling that many of her acquaintances, perhaps even her husband, are in on whatever is haunting Mia... although we all know that it’s Annabelle, the daughter of the dead neighbours, who is inhabiting the doll. Or is it, exactly? There’s something of a mixed story idea, I think, because there’s also a demon coming visiting at odd hours that also seems to be using Annabelle as a conduit to our world.

The last act of the movie lets the film down somewhat, for my money. The obvious characters who our main protagonists have met over the course of the film both fulfil their very obvious roles and the ending is somewhat of a comedown given that there was a lot of subtle work throughout the majority of the rest of the movie. There’s another nice nod to The Conjuring at the end and, though there could be room for a sequel to get squeezed in here if the box office on this spin off is big enough, I suspect this is probably the last we’ll be seeing of Annabelle, descended from both real life and a series of cinematic and television “sinister dolls with minds of their own”.

If you loved The Conjuring as much as I did, then you’re certainly going ot want to watch this just to see how it fits in with things. If you are a horror fan in general then just remember that Annabelle is not exactly the greatest horror movie ever made. This is an okay and competent attempt at a fairly jumpy but ultimately slightly less than satisfying genre film and, if that’s enough for you, and for most of us that would be, then this one is definitely worth a gander. However, like I said before... it’s not The Conjuring.

Dark Skies

Dark Grey

Dark Skies
USA 2013
Directed by Scott Stewart
Playing at cinemas now.

Non-warning: 
Any spoilers in here are those which are already in the trailer. 

It was well over twenty years ago that I first heard of Whitley Streiber in something other than the context of his early career as a horror writer. I read a report, I think online, about him having been seen going around the area he lived in and spending a small fortune buying all kinds of alarm equipment and firearms etc to make his home as unbreachable as he could to any kind of hostile invaders. The article took a slightly patronising tone, reminded people that he’d just written the “autobiographical” novel Communion, and metaphorically patting him on the arm as if to say, “There, there. We believe you.”

The thing is, and the thing that stuck in my mind when I read that small snippet of an article, was that, well why would you go out of your way spending all that money and taking all that time to fix up and install all these different devices, if you didn’t at least believe something was out to get you?

So I read the book and saw the movie and, frankly, what I read in the book chilled me to the marrow. And so, a few years before TV shows like The X Files and, um, Dark Skies, popularised this kind of stuff big time, I started doing some research in my spare time on the subject myself. I got the librarians at the place where I worked to get out inter-library loans on various of the more respected accounts of the phenomenon of... well...alien abduction, and began to really read up on it.

About the same time, a British guy named Nick Pope was working for the Ministry Of Defence and was assigned the task of investigating various UFO related reports which had piled up over the years and ascertaining if any of them had any interest or, indeed, posed a threat to the military. My understanding is that Pope didn’t believe in such hogwash and went at it with a very cynical attitude. The attitude didn’t last too long though because he found that a small percentage of the things he investigated really didn’t have any explanation, from what I gather, other than what he was trying to debunk, and he resigned and the MOD shut the project down. He carries on investigatng, somewhat less cynically, in a private capacity today, from what I can gather.

And, again, around the same time, someone came to work at the same place as me for a while and one of his previous jobs had been air traffic control. He “believed” totally and said after the kinds of things that you routinely see and get reported in that job, you have to sign the official secrets act.

So I carried on reading and two things came out of my personal research into extraterrestrial visitors.

One of the things I noticed is that the people who firmly believe this stuff and investigate it do tend to be the most cynical people going. They distrust everything but solid evidence and, sometimes, that evidence is there to be found (and ignored or covered up by any kind of government sanctioned body).

Secondly, I believed this stuff so much, because the cases made from various methods of research were so airtight, to be honest, that I had about three years of sleepless nights (that’s okay, I was younger and could handle that... but it was fear that kept me awake). I mostly, deliberately stay away from this kind of stuff now. I believe the matching accounts of groups of people on crowded streets (mayors, police officers and passers by) who all collectively witnessed single incidents of the most amazing and unbelievable kind and all independently reported these things... as much as I believe the aliens can be categorised and identified by most people involved in these encounters, even those who have come from small tribes cut off from the rest of the planet and who are “totally” unpolluted by anything happening in Western culture. They all draw the same drawings.

So yeah, I leave that stuff alone now because, frankly, I’m getting on now and I need my sleep.

And that’s exactly why competently put together movies like this one called Dark Skies (which has no ties with the similarly themed TV show from a couple of decades ago) work so well on me.

Now I saw a trailer for this movie and it looked pretty much like a standard haunted house meets Greys scare movie, Greys being a specific and most widely seen alien type (if you believe that kind of thing, but that’s exactly why they’re mined so much in modern popular culture). Well I have to say, this movie does pretty much everything as advertised. There are no twists, just scary visitations from our little grey friends (Zeta Reticulans, for the record) interwoven with a few other phenomena to spice up the scare factor and neatly summarised by the “Van-Helsing-but-only-in-an-advisory-capacity” alien researcher played so credibly by the always watchable J.K. Simmons.

The whole film is full of standard scare tactics and cliché ridden horror tropes but, that’s okay, because it is really all quite well put together and it certainly had my heart beating faster (but then again, as I have taken time to explain here, I’m prone to that kind of extra-terrestrial implied threat anyway). The music, by composer Joseph Bishara, is well put together and delivers all the modern atonal nightmarish quality you’d need in a score like this, sci-fi’d up with a bit of subsonic synthesizery stuff which kicks in when required. The direction and shot design are all pretty much adequate/competent and the performances are all fine too.

The writing is a bit patchwork in its sources, to be truthful, and the obvious attempt at misdirecting you away from the actual target of the extraterrestrial antagonists is both obvious and quickly guessed, so the ending is of no real surprise and it really could have done without the “beat you over the head with stuff you were more than aware of at the time” flashbacks in the little epilogue sequence... although the very last 30 seconds or so was a nice touch.

But, all said and done, the film is still quite scary (it veers from various research accounts at times to quite deliberately justify why it is trying to scare the audience at one point) and certainly, although nowhere near the best film made on this kind of subject material, it does still manage to be quite grippng and suspensful througout a fair few of the set pieces, despite the number of familiar “horror moments” which are piled on. So, yeah, if you like this kind of stuff then you certainly shouldn’t find yourself too dissapointed in this one. It’s a scary night out at the pictures.

And if you find yourself dweling on the dubious nature of the story and the presence of a malevalent extra terrestrial force on earth which "first" appeared on the scene during the age of science, ask yourself this... Why are elves, pixies, faeries and whatever other small creatures always popping up in various countries’ cultural mythologies?

And why do churches have gargoyles?