Post by Joanna on Jun 6, 2015 1:07:25 GMT -5
MOVIE REVIEW: Insidious: Chapter 3
The horror prequel Insidious: Chapter 3 is a simple origin story, laying out, in somewhat ho-hum fashion, the details of how everyone’s second-favorite ghostbusters – steely spiritual medium Elise Rainier and her clownish sidekicks, known as Specs and Tucker – got together. Does anyone really care?
Leigh Whannell apparently thinks so. The writer of all three Insidious films – who also plays Specs – takes over the director’s chair from horror maestro James Wan (The Conjuring), moving Elise (Lin Shaye) and company a little more front and center. This is fine by me. Along with Shaye’s supernatural exterminator, the characters Specs and Tucker (Angus Sampson) were the best things about chapters 1 and 2, proving popular enough to spawn their own series of tie-in webisodes. But the two characters are also somewhat polarizing. As Whannell explained to the fan site Dread Central in 2012, “There was this hatred that spewed out from fans saying, ‘I hated those guys! ... They ruined the (first) movie!’ ”
Specs and Tucker are not what ruined the first or second movies. Both films were done in by their over-the-top depiction of a fog-shrouded underworld populated by soul-sucking zombies and ruled by a demon made up like Darth Maul. But the sidekicks are not enough to save Chapter 3 from the same flaws that sank the first two films.
Set a few years prior to the haunting depicted in the original film, the third installment centers on a teenage girl (Stefanie Scott) who has been targeted by a new stalker from the afterlife, a realm known in all three movies as The Further. This restless etheric entity – referred to, in rather clinical fashion, as The Man Who Can’t Breathe – is just what he sounds like: an old dude in a hospital gown with an oxygen mask. For no apparent reason, TMWCB leaves oily footprints, which are there one minute and gone the next, whenever Whannell needs something to jolt the audience awake. This, unfortunately, occurs quite often in this film, which is more silly and soporific than scary. Insidious: Chapter 3 is rated PG-13. Contains violent and frightening images and some coarse language.
Anyway, TMWCB haunts the apartment building where Quinn (Scott) lives with her widowed father (Dermot Mulroney) and little brother (Tate Berney), feeding off Quinn’s soul, which he appears to nosh on, in nibbles, the way an old man might take a week to finish a snack-size bag of chips. His half-finished meal is rendered, in one of the film’s stupidest – and most literal-minded – visual effects, as Quinn’s body without a face and with a couple extremities missing.
I’m happy to see Shaye back after her character was killed off in Chapter 2. At 71, she’s still got what it takes to tangle with a poltergeist. And Specs and Tucker provide welcome fizz to the all-too-leaden proceedings. Even the reappearance of the ghostly “Bride in Black” – the supernatural villain from the first two films – is a good thing. It’s just that the Insidious franchise, after three attempts to exorcise its real demons, still can’t seem to shake what really haunts it: the ghost of B-movies past.
Source: Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post, June 5, 2015.