Carnography

WNUF Halloween Special (2013)

While Ghostwatch will always hold a place in my heart as the BBC drama that inadvertently terrified me and a generation and was at least partly responsible for kindling the fascination with found footage and mockumentary horrors and the way in which certain publicity methods and media, in general, can create a special type of buzz around films almost greater than the film itself, it's not the only film out there to utilise this format. Today we're taking a look at the WNUF Halloween Special, a "film" I'd been wanting to see since it first came out but which I only got around to seeing it last night.

It's October 31, 1987, and television channel WNUF is broadcasting their special Halloween programming. Among the safety tips for trick-or-treaters, a local dentist's "Cash for Candy" scheme and a segment on a Christian group who believe that the holiday is evil and that all those who participate in it will come to an unpleasant end, the highlight of the night is a live broadcast from the Webber House, a local property that has stood empty since the brutal murders of Mr and Mrs Webber by their son 20 years previously. The son claimed that he had been driven to commit the murders by demonic spirits after using an Ouija board, and many people have claimed that the house is still haunted by those spirits. Reporter Frank Stewart plans to broadcast a live investigation into the house, with a Catholic priest and a psychic investigator couple and their "psychic" cat Shadow, and even hold a phone-in seance in the house on live TV. Almost from the moment they enter the house, however, the psychics begin to feel that there is a threatening presence in the house and that they are in danger. Frank is flippant about the whole situation though and demands the investigation and broadcast continue, even after the investigators' equipment is smashed and Shadow goes missing. Clearly, someone or something is in the Webber House with Frank and the others; will this live broadcast prove the existence of ghosts, or will this all end badly for the crew?

As I said at the start, I've wanted to see the WNUF Halloween Special since it came out in 2013; I couldn't bring myself to watch it until last night, however, because the moment I learned there was a cat going into the house I had a terrible feeling about what that would mean for poor Shadow. To say whether I was right or wrong would constitute a spoiler though, and since the WNUF Halloween Special is best experienced knowing as little as possible going in, all I'll say is that I succeeded in watching it, and I'm glad I did - even if my heart was pounding with the horrible anticipation of potential cat death for parts of it.

The whole gimmick of the WNUF Halloween Special is that it's an old VHS recording of the live broadcast from 1987, complete with static, the occasional tracking error and even ad breaks and local TV ads (which reminds me, must go down to Phil's Carpet Warehouse). This serves to both give the film a massive dose of cinema verite authenticity, and also give a massive dose of nostalgia for anyone watching who grew up in the 1980s. Granted, some of this was lost on me because UK 80s TV was pretty different from US 80s TV, but I can still appreciate the effect the film was going for. I will say that the frequency of the ads did start to grate on me after a while, and the pacing did start to suffer as a result of them as the film progressed, especially with the way the film would "fast-forward" through the ads on several occasions. It did keep with the concept that this is an old VHS tape that we're watching and that we're just skipping through some of the "boring bits", but it was really a very fine line between immersion and boring that they trod with this idea.

The WNUF Halloween Special does succeed in creating the right kind of atmosphere though. You really could believe that this was broadcast in the 1980s, on a small local channel, and that people just stumbled on it that Halloween night in 1987, not realising what they were tuning into and remaining transfixed as the events unfolded. You can see that it learned its craft from some of the greats (although your mileage may vary) of the past - The Last Broadcast, The Poughkeepsie Tapes, The Blair Witch Project and possibly even Ghostwatch itself, from framing to the potentially unreliable narrator (because hey, this could still be just one big hoax, right?)

The atmosphere in which you watch the WNUF Halloween Special is also key to how much you enjoy it, I think. I was lucky enough to watch it as part of a group, where we kept up the conceit that the events we were watching really happened, at least in part for the people (like me) who hadn't seen it before. Of course, we knew it was all fiction, but it was fun for those 82 minutes to really suspend disbelief and get properly into it. I certainly think I wouldn't have had the same enjoyable experience if I'd watched it on my own in a drier, more analytical setting, so take that as you will. But if you're like me and enjoy things like Ghostwatch and Local58, then you should definitely give the WNUF Halloween Special a watch.

 

Amazon US

Hell House LLC 2: The Abbadon Hotel (2018)

As I said in my review of the first Hell House LLC movie, I came to this series very recently after pointedly ignoring it for some time, thinking it was just another generic found footage "investigation into a scary house goes terribly wrong" movie - and how very wrong I was. Part of the reason I finally got around to watching the first movie was hearing that a sequel was coming out, so after having the pants scared off me with the first movie, I then moved on to the second - Hell House LLC 2: the Abbadon Hotel. But will the sequel managed to be as horrifying as the first one, or did it use up all its scares already?

Set in 2017, it's been eight years since the events at the Hell House set up in the Abbadon Hotel caused the deaths of 15 people, and later the disappearance of documentary filmmaker Diane Graves, and both the film and the hotel have become urban legends of a sort, with thrillseekers regularly breaking into the hotel (and never coming out again) despite a police presence and morning news shows doing segments on the phenomenon. Investigative journalist Jessica Fox decides to do an investigation into the hotel and its deadly history after receiving a transcript from an unknown source and manages to persuade Mitchell Cavanaugh, the only surviving member of the 2014 documentary team, to accompany them into the hotel. Once inside, however, they discover not only more mysterious tapes that reveal more about the dark history of the Abbadon Hotel, but also that there might have been more to the events at the Hell House than had previously been known. Unfortunately, they also find themselves trapped in the hotel as well, as the dark forces there have plans for them that go beyond just terrifying and tormenting them...

For his 1961 horror film Homicidal, director William Castle created a promotional gimmick he called the "Fright Break", wherein audience members too afraid to watch to the end of the film had a 45-second window before the film's climax to leave the cinema and receive a full refund. After having to pause the movie about two-thirds of the way through again to go into the other room to calm down and pet the cat, I'd like to propose that we bring the "Fright Break" back, if only for the sake of my blood pressure and digestive system. Yes, I was slightly dubious as to whether The Abbadon Hotel could be as seriously unnerving as the first film, but after only 15 minutes my fears were assuaged - or intensified, depending on how you look at it. I'm not ashamed to admit that the sight of just a pair of legs standing halfway up a flight of stairs and doing nothing else managed to make me watch through my fingers for the remainder of the scene, or that even though I knew that Huggy the Evil Eyeless Clown (I started calling him Huggy in an attempt to make him less scary. It didn't work) would inevitably make an appearance, I still cringed in my seat when he did. In fact, I'm happy that The Abbadon Hotel continued in this series tradition of scaring the living daylights out of me because before I discovered the Hell House LLC movies I'd almost given up hope that I'd be scared by anything but jump scares (which don't count) in horror ever again.

The plot is, again, the weakest part of the whole movie, feeling a little bit hokey with its 80s Satanic cult meeting in the hotel and performing sacrifices for their own ulterior ends, but since the plot is really just the basic structure that the film hangs its atmosphere, scares and generally very unnerving air on, that doesn't really matter too much. I did spot one potential plot hole in the claim that the entire cult all committed suicide in the hotel's dining room, when in the previous film we saw just owner Andrew Tully hanging there, but since this film did finally explain what secret Alex had been keeping from the rest of his crew from the first film and we're apparently getting another film after this, I will remain optimistic that everything will eventually be explained (and if not, it's hardly that important anyway). Some of the plot twists are, again, a little too obvious - I know I didn't trust the rather cadaverous-looking Abbadon town council spokesman from the moment I first saw him, for example - but things still flow along smoothly enough rather than jerking forward awkwardly with abrupt revelations thrown at the audience in the third act like many modern horrors.

As well as Huggy the Clown, creepy ghost girl returns for the sequel as well, and she's also joined by some of the victims of the Hell House from the previous film. We also get a nice little Vanishing Hitchhiker segment and aspects of the way the Abbadon Hotel/its spirits operated reminded me of both House of Leaves and the Dionaea House, albeit with their own spin on it. The use of multiple sources of found footage, inserted throughout the film so that it jumps back and forth from previous incidents and a TV segment that gradually tells the story of how this new group ended up in the hotel, to the events that befell this ill-fated group, both keeps with the mockumentary style and serves to keep the audience off-balance, so that we're not sure where the next scare is going to come from. There's also a TV psychic who enters the hotel with our group, and much like with Grave Encounters I couldn't wait to see him meet a sticky end in there.

Hell House LLC 2: The Abbadon Hotel is currently available exclusively on Shudder, and is indeed meant to be the middle part of a trilogy. Clearly the series is building to something big for the third and final part, and I for one am really looking forward to seeing it.

 

 

The Nun (2018)

Nunsploitation is a funny little subgenre. It existed almost entirely in the 1970s, and almost always involved nuns living in a convent some time in the Middle Ages getting all hot and bothered as a result of demonic influence, repressed sexuality or a bit of both. Some films might also include some criticism of Catholicism and religion in general, but let's be honest, that's not the reason most people watched them. Even Ken Russell's The Devils is better known for its sexual imagery rather than its commentary on religion.

The 2018 film The Nun is not nunsploitation. I just wanted to add something in about the subgenre before getting started with the actual review.

Romania, 1952. Father Burke, a Vatican investigator, and Sister Irene, a novitiate nun who hasn't yet taken her vows, arrive at an isolated convent to investigate the apparent suicide of a nun by hanging there. They are taken to the convent by Frenchie, one of the locals, who was also the one who found the nun's hanging body. Local superstitions hold that the convent and the surrounding area are cursed somehow, and this appears to hold true as strange things start to occur the moment they arrive at the convent - fresh blood is found at the spot where the nun died; her body has moved to a sitting position when they find it, and the convent seems deserted aside from a few fleeting glimpses of nuns and a Mother Superior who hides behind a full-length black veil. As Burke and Irene investigate, they discover that the convent was built by a Duke who wished to raise a demon through a rift in the basement but was stopped and the rift sealed. However, during World War 2 the convent was bombed and the rift began to open, requiring the nuns to pray constantly to hold the demon, Valak, back. It falls to Burke and Irene to somehow re-seal the rift before Valak escapes into the world...

The Nun is the latest entry in the Conjuring "cinematic universe" started by James Wan before he went off to do bigger and wetter things with Aquaman and is, in fact, a prequel to all of them, being set in 1952. It's also supposed to tie all the films together and was probably dangled in front of us like a carrot on a stick more than that bloody Annabelle doll, possibly because evil ghost nun was creepier than slightly creepy-looking evil doll. And it probably should have been as well, because nuns and old convents have an innate creepiness about them. Unfortunately, by the time this film came around, the well of creepiness and actual tense filmmaking appears to have dried up, and The Nun is left with nothing original to show.

Every key or scary moment in the film was either telegraphed well in advance or reminded me (once again) of another film or TV show that had done it first, and better. There's Chekov's Buried Alive Bell, for one. The scene that features in the trailer where Irene is walking through the catacombs and there's a faceless nun in a habit following her? Seen it in Armchair Theatre (Quiet as a Nun). And the bit straight after was done better in Exorcist III. A key part of the climactic battle against Valak? Tales From The Crypt's Demon Knight, of all things. A scene in the graveyard? Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead. Perhaps the bit that killed any hope of the film scaring or even startling me was the way that the demonic nun moved - it looked like she was on castors or rollerskates, gliding soundlessly around the convent, and all I could do is be reminded of the Mother Superior/Penguin in The Blues Brothers. Once that image was stuck in my head, there was really no hope left, really. The dry ice didn't help either - as it billowed out of a sinister door and Valak's evil nun face started to emerge, a voice in my head provided the line, "And tonight on Stars In Your Eyes, Valak will be performing Cold as Ice, by Foreigner."

Even the bits that didn't feel directly cribbed from other movies weren't original either. Of course Father Burke has an incident in his past that he feels guilt over, and of course that's going to be used against him by Valak. Of course Frenchie is there to be a not-quite love interest (because even in a film where the protagonists are a priest and a nun, you've still got to have some romantic tension apparently), provider of dumb muscle and, by the end, convenient plot device to help tie all the films together. At least Sister Irene's visions were plot-necessary, albeit also Deus Ex Vatican (it's never explained how the Vatican knew that her visions specifically were connected to the convent or to Valak, and if they did have an inkling of what was happening there then just sending two people to seal a rift that previously took a holy relic and a dozen or so Templar Knights seems a little shortsighted).

And then there's the issue of the Hollywood Satanism. Yes, I know, I've complained about this before, but really, if I was a Catholic who venerated the Petrine Cross I'd be getting really annoyed every time a movie used it as a symbol of ultimate evil. It's really not that difficult to research some actual Satanic symbols, but I guess that was just too much effort for the film, especially as they've been freely using it in all the other films up till now as well.

In the end, The Nun was a disappointing addition to the Conjuring universe, and not just because it wasn't the film involving the werewolf demon I've been calling for a while now. It doesn't have the right atmosphere or enough original ideas of its own to sustain it, and it felt as though the filmmakers were instead hoping it could coast along on the shirttails of the other movies rather than stand up on its own. After all, there's a reason most horror franchises start having diminishing returns and more and more negative reviews of their sequels the longer they go on...

Hereditary (2018)

It seems like everyone has been hyped up for Hereditary for several months now. From the moment the trailer first hit people were practically screaming about how it was the "scariest film ever!", and more recently, I saw an advert on the side of a bus declaring it to be "this generation's The Exorcist". Well, you know me; I take things like that as a challenge.

Annie Graham is an artist who creates complex scenes in miniature. She is married and has two children, Peter and Charlie. At the very start of the film her mother, Ellen, has just died and at the funeral, Annie talks about the difficult relationship she had with her mother, who she describes as being a very private person, with "secret rituals". Mental illness runs strongly through Annie's family - her father suffered from depression so bad he starved himself to death; Annie's brother was a schizophrenic who killed himself, claiming their mother was "trying to put people inside him"; and Ellen suffered from disassociative identity disorder. Annie clearly has her own problems as well; she sleepwalks and admits to one time waking up to find she had poured paint thinner over herself and her children and was about to set them all alight. Annie and her family are clearly only barely holding things together, but when another terrible event occurs they start to break down entirely. Are the strange events and brief sightings in the house and around them supernatural in nature, or are they the symptoms of Annie's seemingly inevitable mental breakdown?

Hereditary has traumatised me, and I mean that in the best way possible. Really, this film is going to stay with me for weeks - particularly one image in particular which I'm not completely happy about because I have enough problems sleeping as it is. But this is a good thing - a great thing, even - as the film has succeeded in what it set out to do - unsettle, unnerve and leave a lasting impression on its audience.

It's a little difficult to review Hereditary, as I've got to be careful what I say - accidentally revealing even the slightest of plot details could spoil the whole thing and lessen the impact of the film. So what can I say? Well, the trailer tells us about the death of Annie's mother, and we can see from what we're shown there that she - and by extension the rest of her family - aren't dealing too well with that death. Annie, in particular, is clearly wound so tight that when she eventually breaks we know we'll be finding pieces five miles away. And then on top of that, [A TERRIBLE THING] happens and things get even worse. And this [TERRIBLE THING] isn't telegraphed or led up to in any way - it happens quite abruptly and that alone is enough to shock us, but then we see the absolutely gut-wrenching aftermath, which ends up with Annie even more broken and desperately hanging on. And I found myself really feeling for Annie - whether it was my own experiences with grief, loss and mental illness or Toni Collette's utterly devastating performance I don't know (maybe it was both). then again, I also empathised with Annie's husband, Steve (played by Gabriel Byrne) - a completely normal husband and father trying his hardest to keep his family together through everything that happens.

The camera work in Hereditary only adds to the film's unsettling nature as well. There are a lot of close, tight shots of everyone - lots of close-ups of people's faces, the camera giving them very little space whatsoever, so it really feels as though we the audience are intruding on them in these traumas. It's all very uncomfortably claustrophobic, almost like things are taking place in one of the little dioramas that Annie makes.

The movie keeps its cards very close to its chest as well for its two-hour runtime. There are obscure little hints as to the true nature of what might be going on throughout, but right up until the film's climax we can't be sure whether we're watching a family's complete psychological breakdown due to tragedy, or whether something supernatural is actually going on - and if there is, what does any of it mean? And either explanation would work and be just as horrifying.

Usually when I find a film I really, really like, I'm still able to find one or two flaws in it that brought me out of the film or tripped the film up somewhere. This isn't the case with Hereditary. There were a couple of moments where I thought things had taken a misstep, but upon thinking about them they still fit the film; they still work with the atmosphere and narrative. Hereditary is as close to a perfect horror film that I've seen in a long while, and I don't use that word lightly.

(Also, there are no jump scares.)

 

 

Insidious: The Last Key (2018)

And so we finally, finally come to the latest and (currently) last entry in the Insidious franchise - Insidious: The Last Key. And yes, I've been putting this review off for a while, for reasons I'll get into shortly, but the nagging voice in the back of my head has finally won out and so here we are, with a prequel that's a sequel to a previous prequel that (allegedly) ties up everything neatly with the first two movies in the series, which are actually sequels to this film. A cinematic Ouroboros, if you will.

After the events of the previous film, Elise Rainier is now working with paranormal investigators Tucker and Specs full-time, and they make quite the effective team. When Elise receives a call from a man needing help from the town of Five Keys, New Mexico, however, she at first refuses to help him - because the house he is living in is the same house she grew up in, suffering abuse at the hands of her father who beat her for being able to communicate with ghosts. Eventually though, her conscience wins out and she agrees to help - only to discover much more than a simple haunting in the house. Something has been dwelling there for a long time, since Elise was a child, and has been influencing or even possessing people to do terrible things there. At the same time, Elise tries to reconnect with her younger brother, whom she has been estranged from for many years, and when his daughters become involved they find themselves in danger from the evil inside the house. Once more, Elise has to enter the "Further" to rescue her niece and confront the sinister force that caused her so much misery throughout her childhood...

So. The reason why I kept putting off this review is that the film really wasn't inspiring me to write about it. Insidious: The Last Key is by-the-numbers formulaic to an almost extraordinary degree. Its plot beats follow the plot of the previous movie so closely you'd wonder if there wasn't some sort of find-and-replace function being used on the script. Elise gets asked to help someone; Elise refuses because of [reasons]; Elise relents because she's a good person; the problem is worse than Elise realised; Elise goes into the Further; family is reunited and everyone gets a bun. Yes, the ghost scenes and effects are good, particularly the bit where the evil spirit/demon "locks" its victims into not being able to scream... but that bit's well and truly spoiled in the trailers, so when it turns up in the film proper its effect is somewhat dulled. It just felt to me that, at this point in the franchise, people were just going through the motions because of contractual obligations or similar, rather than being genuinely excited to make yet another chapter in the series.

There's also the case of Tucker and Specs, the comic relief, and in The Last Key there were some scenes with them that really felt out of place. The prime example of this is where they meet Elise's nieces for the first time, who I'm guessing were no older than early college age, and Tucker and Specs promptly start to creepily hit on them. I get that they're there to provide some levity to the films, and I don't actually dislike the characters... but some of these scenes come straight after revelations of Elise's childhood abuse or of the other women who were tortured in the house, and so the mood whiplash is awkwardly prominent. I just think they should have toned their goofiness down a little perhaps, or moved some of those scenes around so they didn't come after some grimdark revelation.

Another thing that The Last Key does, or at least claims to do, is tie up events from previous films so that they all flow together... and while we do get a further explanation as to the significance of the red doors, one plot thread is left glaringly unwoven - just what was the deal with that gas mask setup that Elise used in the very first Insidious? We were told back then that it was something she used to make contact with the spirits easier... yet in this film and Chapter 3 there's no sign or mention of it. Yes, it's clear that when they made the first film they had no idea that they were going to end up with a marketable franchise and that Elise would be the central character of it all, so they dropped that rather unwieldy prop as soon as they were able... but not even a throwaway mention of it? A joking comment from the comic relief? I know I'm probably the only person bothered by this, but when a film claims to be tying loose ends in a series together, I don't think it's too outrageous to expect things like this.

Insidious: The Last Key isn't a bad film - but it's no longer anything new and original. It follows the same plot as the previous entries in the series, and while that's hardly a deal-breaker, the formulaic nature of it robs it of some of its tension and scare potential. Apparently, there's also talk of a potential crossover between Insidious and the Sinister series - both are produced by Blumhouse Productions - but to me, the idea of a showdown between ghost Elise and Mr Boogie is more amusing than anything. The snake has successfully bitten its tail; let's not go about trying to get it to grow a second head.

Amazon UK

Amazon US

 

 

Ghost Stories (2018)

I have been waiting to see this movie for months, ever since I first saw the trailer for it late last year. A British horror movie from one of the same people behind the TV show The League of Gentlemen? That from the very first trailer promises to mess with our perceptions? Not to mention all the reviews from people who saw it at the festivals and conventions before it got a wide release who couldn't say enough good things about it. My only fear was that Ghost Stories would fall into the same pit as so many other films I want to see at the cinema but never make it to my local multiplex, but for once the gods smiled upon me and it came out this week. So now to see if my anticipation will be rewarded or crushed underfoot.

Professor Philip Goodman is a sceptical parapsychologist who makes his living debunking paranormal phenomena and exposing fake psychics. He is contacted by Charles Cameron, another parapsychologist who disappeared some years previously, who challenges Goodman with three cases that Cameron claims he cannot explain away. So Goodman goes investigating them, thinking he can easily find rational explanations for all of them, but each case is more bizarre than the last. From ghostly encounters in old warehouses to strange creatures in the woods at night to an apparent poltergeist and a monstrous baby, Goodman finds that things are getting more and more confusing, and reality starts to blur for him as he himself starts to see and experience apparently supernatural events. How are these three cases connected and what is Charles Cameron's ultimate goal in trying to make Goodman investigate them - and what is happening to Goodman's world?

Hmm. It's been several hours since I saw Ghost Stories now, and I'm still not sure how I feel about the ending. And I can't even explain here why I'm feeling conflicted, as to do so would be a pretty big spoiler and I'm not going to do that to anyone who wants to see the film themselves. Then again, I'd also definitely recommend Ghost Stories to everyone as it's a very good film, so I guess I'm okay with the ending being what it was. The only thing I'll say about it is that the film likes to mess with your perceptions - hell, it admits that in the trailer and with its tagline of, "The brain sees what it wants to see."

The atmosphere that Ghost Stories creates is by far its biggest achievement. The three stories Goodman investigates are pretty simple in terms of ghost stories - there's the haunted warehouse, the strange goat-like creature on the country road, and the poltergeist - but its the way they're told to us that ratchets up the tension to almost unbearable levels in places. Yes, there are jump scares, but they're organic jump-scares - they flow with the pace of the story and don't feel like they've been shoehorned in for a cheap scare. There's plenty of scares that aren't jump-scares as well - shadowy figures standing just out of focus in the background, lights turning off one by one to leave a hapless night watchman in total darkness, and a plethora of strange coincidences that you start to notice more and more as the film progresses, cluing the audience into the fact that there's more going on here than is on the surface - but what is it? At one point I spent about a minute being terrified of what seemed to be a one-eyed creature peering through a car window... before realising that it was actually the front passenger seat headrest shot slightly out of focus. That's what Ghost Stories' playing around with perception did to me.

There are quite a few references to past horror classics in the film as well - the Hammer Horrors are probably the most important as they probably provided a lot of the influence that went into this film, but I also spotted a quite beautiful homage to The Evil Dead at one point, and there's also the odd nod to Poltergeist and the story of the Enfield Poltergeist as well, among others. Clearly, Ghost Stories was a labour of love for its creators, both in the film version and its original theatrical version. And as for the ending? Well, it all fits together with the events of the film, at least, and is its own brand of horror. The best I can say is that it's going to divide audiences, but it's still more than worth seeing the film to find out whether you love or hate the ending yourself.

 

 

Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015)

We return again to the Insidious franchise, because I will get to the latest entry in this series before April if it's the last review I do (it won't be, but sometimes it feels like it). Of course, Insidious: Chapter 2 ended with ghost Elise still working with Specs and Tucker in their paranormal investigations, but continuing on with that story arc would probably have proven to be overly complicated and difficult to film without annoying its audience. So they decided to go in the other direction and make Insidious: Chapter 3 a prequel.

A teenage girl, Quinn Brenner, goes to visit Elise Rainier in the hopes of having Elise help her contact her mother, who had died 18 months or so earlier of cancer. Elise is unwilling to help, however, as she is suffering from depression since her husband's death and also fearing for her life because of visions of a woman in black who tells her that, if she continues to contact the dead, the woman in black will kill her, although she does tell Quinn to stop trying to contact her mother by herself. Shortly thereafter, Quinn is distracted by a strange figure outside her apartment building one evening and is hit by a car, breaking both her legs. House- and bedbound, Quinn starts experiencing sinister and threatening supernatural phenomena, centring around a figure of a man wearing an oxygen mask who becomes known as "The Man Who Can't Breathe". As things become worse, Quinn's father calls in paranormal investigators Specs and Tucker to try to help, but things become worse as Sean realises they are frauds. Elise comes out of her retirement to help Quinn, but will she have returned in time to save Quinn from the spirit haunting her?

Insidious: Chapter 3 feels more like a movie made to fill in some of the gaps and backstory of a series, rather than a stand-alone movie itself. We get callbacks to the Bride in Black, the Darth Maul/Lipstick-Face Demon and Elise's dealing with Josh Lambert as a child (and considering most of these were in the last movie, it's not really like we needed to be reminded of them). There's also the introduction of Specs and Tucker and the explanation of how they ended up working with Elise (which I did actually appreciate as I'd been wondering how they ended up working together in the first place) and some more backstory for Elise regarding her history with the Bride in Black (which, of course, was conveniently not mentioned in the first Insidious; a clear sign that they came up with more and more of the plot as they made the sequels, rather than having everything plotted out ahead of time). And my gods, that's a lot of brackets in one paragraph.

I actually found myself feeling quite empathetic towards Elise in this movie. Her depression over the death of her husband resonated with me, for obvious reasons, and I could fully understand her desire to draw away from the world after his death, countered with her desire to try to help people with her psychic gifts. It's not too often that you see films portraying things like grief and depression in a way that the audience can connect with, and so I feel this deserves a mention among everything else in the film.

Overall, however, Insidious: Chapter 3 isn't really all that good or memorable. We learn pretty much nothing about the evil spirit du jour, The Man Who Can't Breathe, other than the facts that he once lived in the building and likes to take women's souls for his "pets", and while a comprehensive backstory for a movie's antagonist isn't exactly necessary, I felt that the film missed something in telling us that he used to live in the building and then never investigating that any further. And Insidious: Chapter 3 also suffers from the common ailment of many horror films today - all the good parts got put in the trailer, so there's actually very little to hold the attention when you're watching the actual film. Key scenes of the movie - Quinn getting pulled out of her bedroom window, for example, or the admittedly wince-inducing scene where she breaks her leg casts and walks on her badly broken legs, bones cracking with every step - are thoroughly spoiled because someone in Marketing apparently didn't have enough faith in the movie's name power alone to pull the audience in. But it was still enough to get it another sequel/prequel/Oroborous-like entry in the series...

Amazon UK

Amazon US

 

Winchester (2018)

Well, this is a film I didn't expect to see at the cinema. Seriously, I would have expected Winchester to not get a release to my local cinema at least, much like films like The Belko Experiment or Raw. Hell, even Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri only got a week's worth of general release and that was only after it swept the Golden Globes. I suspect, somewhat cynically, that Helen Mirren being in the lead role as Sarah Winchester is what's gotten this movie its wide release.

It's 1906 in California. Psychiatrist Eric Price is asked by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company to provide a psychological evaluation of Sarah Winchester, widow of the company's founder and majority shareholder - and the rest of the board are hoping to have her declared unfit so they can take her position away from her. Sarah is certainly very eccentric - she keeps her house in San Jose in a perpetual state of construction, day and night, building and demolishing rooms in the house in attempts to appease the spirits of all those killed by the Winchester rifle, whom she believes have cursed her family. Certainly, by that alone Sarah Winchester could be considered paranoid and delusional... but almost from his arrival at the house, Doctor Price starts to experience and see strange things and figures. Is it all just due to his use of laudanum, or is there actually something to Sarah Winchester's beliefs? And if there is, can Doctor Price protect her and her family from the vengeful spirits in the house who want to destroy the Winchester family for their perceived crimes?

There are, I feel, three types of jump scare movies. There are the ones that telegraph every little thing, stretching it to breaking point and leaving no surprise or shock whatsoever - that's your Bye Bye Man types. Then there are the ones that technically do it well, and would be legitimately scary if not for the orchestra abuse they also commit - that's your Annabelle: Creation types. And then there are the movies that make you think you know when the jump scare is coming, and you're just about to sigh in frustration at another predictable "scare"... and then suddenly the scare comes from somewhere else entirely, with no musical sting or telegraphing, and you're all of a sudden aware that you probably shouldn't have drunk all that water before the film started. That's this film, and yes, I'm surprised as well. I honestly wasn't expecting too much from Winchester, and while it's not a great film - if nothing else, after a couple of the jump scares that actually made me jump, it started to be a bit of a case of diminishing returns (also, I went to the bathroom during a talky bit) - it's certainly an above average one.

Winchester is, of course, another "inspired by actual events" movie, in that Sarah Winchester really did have her house in constant construction mode because she believed it was the only way to placate the spirits of those killed by Winchester guns. Today the house is a major tourist attraction and claims to be one of the (if not the) most haunted houses in America. Everything beyond that in the film is entirely fictional, and how much you believe of the legend is up to the individual, although it does seem that just about every "ghost hunting" TV show has done an episode in the real-life house (I'm guessing that they're not allowed to anymore, as Lionsgate bought the photography rights to the house along with the movie, so now any footage taken of the house would be in direct competition with the movie).

The film is directed by the Spierig brothers, who also directed last year's Jigsaw, and if nothing else Winchester shows that they can do tension and scares quite effectively, which I don't think we really got in that previous film. However, the film gets rather bogged down in a couple of subplots that could have done with being trimmed down or even removed entirely - one involving Eric Price's dead wife and another involving Sarah Winchester's niece and grand-nephew - in favour of perhaps some more stuff involving the ghosts inhabiting the mansion, because what little we saw of them really intrigued me and I would have liked to have seen more of them. But as I said, it was surprisingly better than I expected it to be, and after so many years watching horror films and developing a mental callus against jump scares, it's always a pleasant surprise to find myself jolting upright in my seat again.

 

 

Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013)

Way, way back in February 2016, I reviewed a little film called Insidious, after having managed to avoid watching it for six years out of some sort of stubborn bloody-mindedness because everyone else who'd seen it had apparently raved about it till their heads fell off or something. Well, the good news is that, now that the series has reached a Part 4 (which is actually a second prequel that happens before the first movie, just to keep you on your toes), I'm actually trying to catch up on the other three films sometime before the heat death of the universe. So here we are with Insidious: Chapter 2.

We start off pretty much straight after where the first film left off, with psychic Elise Rainier dead at the hands of Josh... or rather, at the spirit that we saw had taken over Josh's body, the old woman dressed in black. With no evidence that they can find to link Josh to the murder, the police are forced to let the family move on, and they do their best to do so, moving into Josh's mother's house while forensics continue to go over their home. Once again, however, it seems that the supernatural has followed them, as Renai and Josh both continue to experience encounters with spirits and other supernatural phenomena... but Josh seems determined to just move on and deny that anything strange is happening, even when it is happening to him. At the same time an old friend and fellow psychic of Elise's, Carl, and her two assistants, Tucker and Specs, help Josh's mother Lorraine to investigate what is happening to Josh, and just who the woman in black who haunted him in his childhood really is. But will they uncover the truth and save Josh before it's too late?

One day I'm going to write a book where the main character is a psychic who can communicate with ghosts without them having to give obscure and cryptic responses to questions. None of this, "Who killed you?" "SHE DID," nonsense that only serves to add artificial tension to a plot. The spirit will be able to answer, quite clearly, "Well I don't know their name but they looked like this... Oh, and they said this..." Sure, it might take away some of the mystery of the overall story, but at the same time, I'd hope that I'd be helping people who think like me to not grind their teeth with frustration every time a spirit gives a vague answer to a question just to draw out the runtime some more. So yeah, you might be able to guess from this that I wasn't a big fan of the way Insidious: Chapter 2 tried to draw out its plot mysteries, especially after events in the previous film (and at some points in this one) have already told us what's going on. We saw at the end of the first film that Josh was possessed by the old woman in black; why is this film making this revelation such a big deal now?

Honestly, I wasn't as impressed by Insidious: Chapter 2 in general. Many of the things that I liked in the first movie, such as the set-pieces we saw while Josh wandered the Further in search of Dalton, are gone or severely reduced, and it seems that in their place is an over-long middle segment where several characters explore an old house. Even worse, they added some found footage elements to this segment, which in a film that's part of a series where found footage hasn't been and isn't a thing, really sticks out as just trying to jump onto a gimmick train (and that train was looking pretty run-down even in 2013). That's not to say there aren't any good parts - one scene where they're investigating the old house and all the rocking horses in a room start moving at once, in perfect sync, is legitimately creepy - but it definitely feels like much of the previous film's creepiness has been cut out in favour of some overly-drawn out plot revelations.

I also get the impression that the filmmakers really weren't expecting the character of Elise to have been so popular, seeing how they killed her off at the end of the first movie, so it feels like they had to scramble a bit to get her back in this film. This is a rather polite way of saying that the flashback bit at the beginning of the film with a younger version of Elise being dubbed by Lin Shaye stuck out like a very awkward sore thumb. We would have accepted that she was Elise even if she hadn't sounded like old Elise, you know.

Overall, Insidious: Chapter 2 isn't a bad film... but it's not on the same level as the first film. The creepy elements of the Further being missing hurt it a lot, I think, and their replacement with the mystery plot of who the woman in black is (complete with a moment where they manage to spoil their own revelation in a bad moment of exposition) just isn't creepy enough.

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Amityville Dollhouse (1996)

With Amityville Dollhouse we reach the end of the Yard Sale of the Damned portion of the series, presumably because they finally ran out of household items that could plausibly become evil. However, we're still not even halfway through the film series - or at least the list I found on Wikipedia that I'm using as my guide for this review series.

The Martin family - newly-married Bill and Claire, Bill's children Todd and Jessica and Claire's son Jimmy - move into their new home, which Bill built himself. In a shed also on the lot Bill finds a large dollhouse, complete with a set of voodoo dolls in it, that looks just like the old Amityville house we all know and... know. He gives it to Jessica as a birthday present, and we can already see where this is going. The dollhouse is, of course, the equivalent of a voodoo house, and things that happen in the dollhouse also happen in the real house, such as a pet mouse in a bedroom that turns into a giant mouse under Jessica's bed. Meanwhile, Jimmy starts receiving visits from his undead father, who encourages him to kill his step-family while decomposing. Claire starts fantasising about having sex with her step-son Todd and Bill dreams of the house burning down. Thankfully, Bill's sister Marla and her husband Tobias are witches or occultists of some sort, but can they save the family from the evil Amityville spirits in time?

Of all the films I've watched in this series so far, Amityville Dollhouse has by far been the hardest one to track down and watch. I'm quite surprised by this - if anything, I'd have expected something like The Amityville Curse or The Evil Escapes to have been the most obscure and out-of-print/unavailable. Thankfully, I eventually got hold of a copy without needing to spend £20+, which is a good thing as I don't like to spend that amount of money on a film I'll only watch willingly once.

The biggest problem is that, while it has several good ideas, it doesn't really do enough with them - in fact, it has too many good ideas, and so none of them really get enough screen time. The voodoo dollhouse is an original idea, for example, but other than the trick with the mouse, very little else happens with it until the very end when it becomes a Deus ex machina. Jimmy's zombie father gets a little more screen time and he's certainly done better than Evil Lamp Dad from The Evil Escapes, but again it's not enough. Honestly, either of these two ideas could have and probably should have had an entire movie to themselves, but having them share 90 minutes just leaves both of them unfulfilled.

Also, what is this series' fascination with incest? This is the third film out of eight to have it as a plot point, and quite frankly it's getting more than a little creepy. There are plenty of other fetishes and perversions out there, evil Amityville spirits - try branching out a little.

The connection with the original Amityville house is also unclear. Yes, the voodoo dollhouse is based on 112 Ocean Avenue, but there is no explanation as to why it was just sitting in that shed, waiting to be found. How did it get there? Who brought it all the way out to the West Coast (I'm assuming it's the West Coast because the film looks like it's set in a desert-like area) Later on, we're also told that the fireplace in the house was the only thing left after the house that was previously on the lot burned down... but what does that have to do with the Amityville mythos? Is the movie trying to tell us that someone took the fireplace and dollhouse from the original Amityville house in New York, shipped it out to wherever this movie is set, built a house around the fireplace which then burned down, leaving only the fireplace, and then Bill came along and built around it again, no questions asked?

...The worst thing about the above paragraph is that I've apparently put more thought into the continuity than the filmmakers did. Hell, even the poster features the wrong Jessica (and in some versions of it they even managed to forget to replace the Evil Lamp with the Voodoo Dollhouse).

It's really no surprise that the Amityville series became dormant for nearly a decade after this film; not only had they clearly run out of ideas for possessed furniture and housewares (evil fridges, microwaves and washing machines having already been taken by other movies), but interest in both making and watching the films was falling to a new low. And so we all breathed a sigh of relief and forgot about the story of the Amityville house, except maybe when reading books of ghost stories at slumber parties to try to scare each other...

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