My Faith In Insidious Restored. Sort of.

"Where's my damn lightsaber!?"

I remember when "Insidious" was first released in 2010 and all I could hear people talking about (those who had seen it of course) was about how scary it was and that it was such a good movie and blah blah blah. 

So I saw it.

Now, to be fair, my standards may have been set pretty high from all the hype I heard but I was utterly underwhelmed by it. It wasn't a bad movie by any means, but it was not the ground-shaking Holy Grail of horror that I was promised. 

It got a lot of things right. Atmosphere? check (see "What Make Horror Horrifying Part 1" for more on that). Effective soundtrack that isn't completely over used? Check. Keeping the villain hidden until a big reveal? Check. I also particularly liked the concept of it not being the house that's haunted but the kid himself. There was excellent suspense-building camera work and convincing performances but it fell into a couple of overplayed formulas: 

• Slow suspense build up with eerie sounds. Seriously, why do evil things
  
  have to make their presence know by being a fucking nuisance around the house?
• A really slow 20 - 30 minutes where nothing really happens. Like at all. 
• Call in the experts (you can find anything on Craigslist! Shit, already used that one in an earlier post... Whatever.)
• Then the obligatory seance for the finale. There's gotta be either a seance or an exorcism and anytime that happens, it makes me a really sad panda.

I was able to look past all of that. Horror movie cliches aren't an immediate movie-kill for me. The movie looked great and a lot of great tension so I went with it and ignored the cliches.

But it was the goddamn "astral travel" thing that pissed me the fuck off. Not 

"I just had garlic covered onions mothafucka!"

because I think it's hokey or anything like that, shit, I thought I could do it when I was younger. Bought a book about it and everything. It's because it was such a cop out for such an interesting premise. And then when they threw in the whole, "he got it from his dad, look Dad can astral travel too" thing, and that's when I lost my shit with the movie. 

I mean, come the fuck on. 

Seriously? Why? Why couldn't it just have been the spirits and demons attacking the kid when his body and mind were in a weakened state which allowed him to become a conduit for malevolent spirits? That works! And it works without out-of-left-field concepts like astral traveling, or bullshit that he got astral traveling powers from his dad! Dammit! How did they fuck that up? And what's with the Darth Maul demon? Granted, he's the biggest badass villain in Star Wars (including Darth Vader. Yeah, that's right. Darth Maul is fucking awesome even if the rest of the movie sucked) but they couldn't come up with something just a wee bit more original?

So I chalked it up to a decent/OK horror film with some good scares and great atmosphere, but with a horribly flawed plot.

Of course they made a sequel because a made a bazillion dollars and I felt obligated to give it a chance because I could have really liked the first one, and I hoped that they fixed some of the problems from the first one. 

I was wrong. They took the worst part of the first one (astral traveling, got-it-from-dad bullshit) and made it the fucking centerpiece of the movie. Goddammit James Wan... Goddammit. 

So naturally they made another sequel because fuck it, it makes money (don't

He looks familiar...

even get me started on "Paranormal Activity") and not only that, it had to be a fucking prequel, which usually when that happens it means they are literally wringing out the very last cent they can get from the franchise. 

For God-knows-what reason, I saw it anyways and I shockingly walked away pleasantly surprised. Although, to be fair in this case, I think my expectations were much lower than before. However, I found that they fixed a lot of the problems from the first two. The words "astral" and "travel" are never mentioned, not once and neither are genetically transmitted abilities or anything like that. They actually went with my idea for the most part. Girl almost dies, left in a weakened state and becomes a lightning rod for malevolent spirits. Awesome!

The scares were better than the first two combined. One really made me jump because I knew something was coming, but I didn't expect it as soon as it came which I thought was a great choice. Whoever did that, good job. 

But it fell into the fatal flaw with so many other horror films, not just the "Insidious" movies: it had a weak third act. That's the problem with a lot of movies that have a huge build up; by the time the finale happens, the big reveal just isn't that big. Not only that, there were way too many seances and too much Dad saving the day when things got hairy. 

But anyways, they got the core of the movie right and they had some damn-good jump scares. The atmosphere was good, not quite as good as the first one but that's probably because James Wan didn't direct. He is exceptionally talented at that. There was also a nice undercurrent of emotional turmoil and drama that the first two lacked that I found to be a nice touch. 

So anyways, I felt satisfied for the first time after seeing an "Insidious" movie. I have a couple other minor complaints (I swear I'm not a cynical dickhead with everything, but I when it comes to horror movies...) but I won't even mention them because I glossed right over them. I didn't love it, but I at least liked it. 

When the next one comes out, because I'm sure another one will, I just might see it. We'll see.