Category: Film

There isn’t any easy way to say this: I was a little disappointed with Insidious: Chapter 2.

It’s not that I thought the movie was outright bad. No, it was decent enough; it certainly held my attention for the duration. What I have a problem with is that it’s not the movie that I was expecting/hoping that it would be. Which I suppose is kind of a petty gripe, because as a sequel it’s actually quite good, so take that as you will.

Insidious 2 begins right where we left off at the end of the first movie, so there’s really no way to describe the plot of the flick without letting slip at least some minor spoilers for the first one. So I guess you’re gonna have to deal with me being all vague and mysterious. This will not go well.

The story picks up with the family dealing with the fallout of the events from the first film. Everyone’s all shaken up, and while they thought that their biggest problem (being haunted) was solved, it quickly becomes apparent that it was not. Well, it was, but it wasn’t. Now they’re being haunted by different spooks. And when the identity of one of those spooks was revealed, I slapped my head so hard because OF COURSE. DUH.

The promotional materials for the movie (like the poster above) will lead you to believe that the movie is about the baby being haunted or possessed or something, but really that’s all a lie. There are a few baby-related scenes, but really the baby has absolutely nothing to do with the actual plot. And if she was supposed to, they certainly did not get that point across very well, because I have no idea why they even bothered with the baby scenes.

All in all, Insidious 2 is more of a murder mystery than your typical paranormal horror flick. I think that the best way to describe it would be Scooby-Doo meets The Shining. Only it’s less dumb than the former, and not nearly as scary as the latter. But it’s a pretty apt description, and the more I think about it, the more fitting it seems. What disappoints me about this is that the movie spends almost all of its time figuring out who the antagonist is and what their motivation is instead of providing us with more of the dreamland shenanigans that I loved so much in the first movie.

In fact, when it comes to the otherworld at all, it’s used even less than it was in the first movie. Again, it only really comes around in the third act, and this time it’s not as full of creepy, surreal imagery. Now it’s… complicated. I won’t get into it in detail, but the story ends up folding in on itself and interweaving with a few scenes in the first film, which is all really cool for a while. And then you realize how weird it is that somehow being in the otherworld allows the characters to actually affect the past. What? Yeah, it’s… it’s not great, especially since they don’t make any effort to describe how this is even remotely plausible or ties into the rest of the established lore.

I want to say that I’m being unnecessarily critical here, because I wanted to just turn off my brain and enjoy the ride, but man, I’m sure that there’s a better way they could have resolved the scenario here than shoehorning in some time-travelling bunkus. I can easily gloss over a minor plot hole or inconsistency here and there, but this one just made no damn sense. Fans seem to be trying to make a case that there is no “sense of time” in the otherworld, but it still seems like a bunch of malarkey to me.

Another thing that stuck out to me is that while the first movie was straight up dramatic horror, part two here has a rather generous helping of comedy relief. I’m not sure it was necessary, but most of the jokes are pretty good so I’ll let it slide. Also, like the first film, this one’s mostly devoid of glaring special effects, except for one scene near the end. In contrast to the rest of the movie, where everything looks very natural, this one bit really stands out. It’s short and fairly inconsequential, but I figured it was worth mentioning.

In conclusion, I did like Insidious: Chapter 2. It wasn’t as good as the first one, and that whole time-travelling bit was annoying, but overall it satisfied. The atmosphere was pretty much what I’m looking for in a horror film, and while it was a bit too big for its britches, I thought the story was pretty good. I just preferred the relative simplicity of the first one. A third film is confirmed to be in the works, and while I’ve got my fingers crossed that they’ll go back to the unsettling distorted reality theme of the first movie, I’ll make sure not to go into it expecting that.

Wifey and I are going to the movies tonight. For a long time, we used to go see a movie every week, but over the last couple years our moviegoing has diminished quite a bit. We still try to catch the really big ones, but generally we’ll only go out to the theatre once a month at the most.

Tonight, we wll be seeing Insidious: Chapter 2. I am pretty excited, because Insidious was so much better than I ever would have imagined it to be. And that’s what I’m going to talk about today, because we watched it again last night as a refresher before we check out the sequel, as I had forgotten pretty much everything about it. I thought that I’d made a post about it back when I saw the movie for the first time, but a site search shows otherwise.

Insidious is a horror movie from the creators of Paranormal Activity and Saw. While I do have a morbid fascination with the myriad different ways they come up with to kill people in the Saw flicks, and the first Paranormal Activity is legit spooky, I’m not a fan of either series. Which is fine because Insidious is totally different from either of them. It’s more of a back-to-basics kind of horror movie; it just wants to tell you a spooky story.

The film starts with a couple, Josh and Renai, moving into a new home with their three kids. While goofing around in the attic, the oldest of the kids, Dalton, wangs his head on the floor, sees something spooky offscreen, and doesn’t wake up the next morning. Doctors call it a coma, but have no explanation for it, saying that the head wound didn’t cause any serious damage. The parents are obviously grief-stricken, and Josh starts spending as much time away from home as possible to avoid dealing with all the stress there.

Meanwhile, stuff starts going bump in the night. And in the day too, I guess. Renai hears voices in the baby monitor, the house’s alarm system goes haywire, and spooky figures begin appearing. This all culminates in the family deciding that the house is haunted and moving again. We’re only about half an hour in here, so obviously that does not work.

Eventually Josh’s mom hires them a team of paranormal investigators, and all the pieces start falling into place. I won’t spoil anything here, because this is a movie you probably should actually watch, but I think it’s obvious enough to note (indeed the box is trying to give it away) that it’s actually Dalton that is haunted, which is why the ghostly people are still stalking around the new house.

What I like here is that it takes the usual “haunting” movie trope of the dad/boyfriend not believing that anything supernatural is happening and twists it on its ear. Josh outright denies the problem at hand when the insvestigators lay their theory on him, but comes around within minutes. I was shocked at how suddenly he changed his mind and got the plot rolling. I was all like “Pssh yeah, typical. Of course he’s not gonna believe it” and then WHAM! George Michael out of nowhere. Totally didn’t see it coming.

The entire third act of the movie is really surreal and cool, too. While the first two acts are business as usual, most of the third takes place in a dreamy otherworld, and ends up kind of making me feel like Insidious was a better Silent Hill movie than the actual Silent Hill movie or its tepid sequel. It’s fairly subtle about the horror elements, and gets its spookiness through more with unsettling imagery, foggy darkness, and the gravity of the situation than violence and gore. A lot of the scary stuff in the movie isn’t immediately threatening; it’s frightening because it’s out-of-place and unnatural. It takes the familiar and distorts it, and that kind of mucking around with reality is the kind of horror that I love to see in movies.

One of the really cool things about Insidious is that while it’s a movie about the supernatural, I’m pretty sure that it uses absolutely no special effects. It’s all makeup, camera trickery, and other practical effects. Smoke machines and lighting are used to great effect here, and they do a really great job of setting the scene. At least, this is what I’m assuming. I haven’t researched the film enough to know for certain that they didn’t use special effects, but there aren’t any that are glaringly obvious. There’s also absolutely no gore, if that’s the kind of thing that’ll keep you away from a movie.

I have two problems with the movie. The first is that it takes way too long to get to the more interesting parts of it. Only about a sixth of the movie is spent in the spooky otherworld, and I feel like if they’d given it a little more time to shine, we could have seen some truly scary things in there. As it is, a lot of the frights before that part of the movie are jump scare variants. Admittedly, a lot of them are really good and you won’t see them coming, but still. I will admit that in this case, it’s probably a good thing that they spent most of the movie building up the story and characters.

My second gripe is the ending. Considering that the rest of the movie feels pretty fresh in a fairly stale genre, the ending is all too predicatable and stands out as nothing more than a hook on which to hang their sequel. Then again, I did just literally ask for more otherworld shenanigans, and I suppose the sequel is giving me exactly that. Or at least, that’s what I’m expecting from it. The reviews are not great, but I find that I almost always enjoy movies that I go in wanting to enjoy. And that’s really the secret. That and my “don’t poke holes, just enjoy the ride” mentality.

At the end of the day, I went into Insidious expecting another paint-by-numbers haunting movie, and came out very pleased at the direction it ended up going. It’s not a renaissance for horror movies by any stretch, but it tries earnestly to do its own thing, and I can dig on that. I highly recommend you check it out if you’re big on the genre in general or a specific affinity for old-school horror.