"Why do you do it to yourself, Ian?" they ask. A valid question. The closest I can come to an answer is that I've watched all of The Conjuring-universe movies at the cinema so far, they'll be far better in that environment than on a TV and while the overall quality is reminiscent of a rollercoaster, I think I just want to see how bad the series can get before someone pulls the plug.
DOLL Annabelle Comes Home is the third in its particular subset of the Conjuring flicks, taking place after the previous two prequel-type movies and once the killer doll is safely ensconced in The Warren's occult artefact museum. With Ed and Lorraine (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) out of the house for the night*1, they arrange for babysitter Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman) to look after their young daughter Judy (McKenna Grace).
But Mary Ellen's best friend Daniela (Katie Sarife) knows of the Warrens' reputation as ghost-hunters, and has reasons for seeing the inside of their infamous vault herself. To add to this, Mary Ellen's prospective sweetheart Bob (Michael Cimino) seems to have picked the wrong night to come a-courting. Before you can say 'Murphy's Law', the doll is free from its holy glass case*2 and all hell is breaking loose. Literally. Will young Judy demonstrate she's a product of her lineage, or is this the end of the line?
DEAD
Short version: Yeah, it's not very good. Longer version: but does it need to be? The Conjuring movies are to the horror landscape what Will Ferrell and Melissa McCarthy are to comedy. An undemanding and often underwhelming baseline by which we can judge everything else, for better or worse (and there is worse). That doesn't necessarily make them bad, although they frequently appear that way upon closer inspection.
And Annablle Comes Home just isn't good. Not as laughably awful as the first Annabelle, but not as committed to its narrative as Creation. Instead, this is a parade of mechanically constructed feints and jump-scares which could have been assembled by a computer. McKenna Grace does quite well given the ludicrous nature of the screenplay, but let's not forget that she was the lead in Gifted, and is far better than this.
HUNTER
James Wan gets a story-credit as the snake eating its own tail, with his input meaning the film is one beat short of going full Insidious (although make no mistake, director and screenwriter Gary Dauberman shoulders most of the blame here). Once Annabelle is out of the box and acting as a spiritual lodestone, that's a license for the movie to start flinging shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Bob ends up hiding from a demonic wolf in the chicken house (one of the last places, surely?), Daniela is locked in the museum-room with My Decomposing Dad™ and Mary Ellen ends up padding around the house above avoiding spirits who have dodged The Ferryman. The film basically turns into Poltergeist, leaving Judy and Annabelle literally snoozing through the second act of their own story.
The initial setup is by-the-numbers, even for a series as grounded in classical folklore*3 as this one. The sequence with the doll in the bedroom is well executed, but it's over far too quickly and is in the trailer anyway, so you're already waiting for it. Then the dialogue for the third act consists mostly of screaming. Whether it's our three leads in the house, Sackless Bob out in the shed, or the laundry-list of unhappy spectres appearing like the products of a cursed conveyor belt from the end of The Generation Game. The story seems to have abandoned the twelve-year cycle of events alluded to in previous installments.
JEDI To add insult to injury, the film has the absolute balls to start lecturing the audience in its final moments. Returning for the coda, Lorraine tells Daniela "When I think of all the evil in here, it reminds me of all the good out there…". I nodded in silent agreement, reminded of the other four movies I could have been watching in that same cinema.
DEAD On the plus-side, Annabelle Comes Home cruises the fuck past the Bechdel Test. That's it. Anyway, here's the summary which could have saved all of these words:
Is Annabelle Comes Home just a dip in the cinematic rollercoaster of The Conjuring? Or does this apparently low plateau signify that we're finally approaching the boarding platform and the ride is over?
I imagine that will depend, as most things do these days, not on the quality of the mechanics themselves, but rather how many people are interested in paying for the ride. We await with bated breath…
The other Conjuring movies. At best.
Not when Midsommar is playing at the same time.
Stream it, then work out if it deserves space on your shelf (it doesn't).
Fuck no.
Fuck yes.
No.
Level 2: McKenna Grace is in this, and she's the young Captain Marvel, in a film with Sam 'Windu' Jackson and Ben 'Krennic' Mendelsohn
That's not because the film is bad on a technical level (even though it's far from great), but just because it's not even trying.
*1 Ed and Lorraine had the right idea when they fucked off after the first ten minutes. Probably the most sensible thing they've done in seven movies, to be fair. [ BACK ]
*2 You'd think that with the thoroughly abandoned priest sub-plot, they could finally do a crossover with Father Ted? [ BACK ]
*3 Why doesn't Lorraine just walk back onscreen and say to the camera "By the way, we really want to make a Black Shuck movie, so please create some buzz around these scenes okay thanks bye."? [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Since the early days of cinema, film-makers have had a fascination with children's toys and the macabre. There's a certain uncanny juxtaposition to be made between the enforced innocence of cherished playthings and their often rigid, mechanical facsimile of the living. I only mention this now because mechanical facsimiles of beloved things may well come up again later.
**look to camera**
Taking place twelve years before the events of Annabelle, we join retired doll-maker Samuel Mullins (Anthony LaPaglia) and his wife Esther (Miranda Otto), living alone in the US dustland and distraught after losing their only daughter in a tragic accident years earlier*1. In a bid to inject some purpose back into their lives, the couple open their home to the church as an orphanage*2. But the ghosts of the past are more than emotional, and one in particular wants to come out and play...
On the plus-side (because I think we all know where this review is heading), at least the series seems to have stopped trying to convince the audience it's based on 'true events'. Relieved of the crippling burden of disbelief-suspension, the audience can at least enjoy the film for what it is - an efficient, if thoroughly heavy-handed, supernatural horror. Taking a format we're all familiar with and an outcome that's pretty much defined by earlier (although chronologically later) entries in the series, Annabelle: Creation executes its frights with practiced ease (even if they're telegraphed to the point where each jolt is nothing more than a physical response to a face appearing on-screen and the subwoofers jabbing into life).
For the most part, the performances here are all par for the genre, with the exception of the young leads Talitha Bateman as Janice and Lulu Wilson as her best friend Linda. Spirited and convincing performances from 'child actors' are a rarity even these days and given the potentially-traumatic subject matter, these two excel in their roles. And not to jump too far ahead, but the film's final link to another chapter in the series is a nice touch, too.
It's just that... well, here we go. The budget for this prequel may have risen ($15m from Annabelle's $6.5m), but the levels of imagination haven't. And it's not that Creation relies on jump-scares so much; that's actually what the film consists of. For me to complain about their presence here would be like griping about a Jim Carrey comedy which features gurning. The problem is that after the first act has set up its plethora of callback-dominoes, the scares are used as the connecting thread for a procession of well-worn horror tropes. To wit:
Much like Hellraiser IV where we see the origin of the puzzle box*3, delving further back into the doll's past threatens to dilute any sense of mystery and threat. Annabelle's reputation rests on it having to murder pretty much everyone on-screen by the time the credits roll. Now that didn't happen in her first standalone film, so...
The cinematic equivalent of a ghost train, Creation is meticulously constructed, but nothing leaps out that the paying punters haven't seen before. If Quiet-Quiet-Bang™ is your thing, you'll probably have fun; it's better than the first Annabelle movie. Although so is herpes.
Best line, from curmudgeonly Samuel, showing the new arrivals round the house:
"Me and my wife stay in this room, the rest of the house is yours to do as you please. Oh, apart from the locked bedroom upstairs that I'll conveniently forget to mention until your hand is on the door later. And I say 'locked', it isn't. You'll see.
So yeah, the whole house apart from our room and the room upstairs.
Oh, and barn. [sigh]
I'll come in again..."
Pretty much any studio-horror movie of the last ten years.
The jump-scares are more enforced on a big screen, so if that's your thing…
Continue the franchise? Yep.
Hang one, you've got a young actress with long dark hair whose name is Samara and you've put her in this instead of a Ring movie..?
Not unless you say something stupid like 'it's my favourite film in the world ever'.
There isn't.
Level 2: Miranda Otto is in this, and she was in those Lord of the Rings movies with (amongst many others) Sir Christopher 'Dooku' Lee.
*1 Not that it's a spoiler at all, but the Annabelle strand seems to work in 12-year cycles of events. I'll be interested to see if anything more is done with that in the future. Either that, or if it's already been revealed why the 12-years is significant and I've just missed it because I've been rolling my eyes throughout each film. [ BACK ]
*2 You can see the reasoning. "We've got unresolved bereavement issues over our little girl, an untouched room full of her stuff and a haunted doll that we're still terrified of. Naturally, the best thing we can do here is give a bunch of already-vulnerable kids free rein to poke around the house. What can go wrong..?"[ BACK ]
*3 Speaking of such an era, the trailers before this movie were for the upcoming remakes of Flatliners and It. Other than the stragglers of my vintage band shirt collection, I'm not sure I'm ready to relive the early nineties just yet, thanks... [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Annabelle Cert: 15 / 99 mins / Dir. John R. Leonetti
You're absolutely right of course, how much was I really going to get out of a spinoff from The Conjuring where the only star to reprise their role is completely inanimate?
Annabelle manages to take a batshit-crazy subplot from one of the most mechanical horror flicks I've ever seen, and fleshes it out into just over an hour and a half of tedious bumping, thumping and shrieking. Complete with a naive young couple (one gullible, one skeptical), grizzled local priest, wise old occult expert with a hidden yet sad past, satanic-cult subplot, plinky-plonk children's mobile, electric hob which switches itself on, record player that not only switches itself on but also moves the needle onto the disc, low-paid actor in a mask and a leotard pretending to be a demon, low-paid actress in a nightshirt covered in blood and dark hair over her face, and the kind of overtly creepy doll that no-one - NO-ONE - would give houseroom to… there's nothing remotely new, scary or indeed interesting here…
Funny however, yes. I did break the Code Of Conduct™ and chuckle audibly at several moments; when the dialogue or the acting delivering it sunk below its reliably shoddy level, or when the audience is reminded (repeatedly) that the film is connected with The Conjuring. Oh, and the bit when the doll 'stands up'. That one's an absolute howler. I can see how this would have looked passable on paper, and I can't lay the blame at the feet of the cast or the director, but Annabelle just fails to work on every level it needs to as a horror film (I wasn't alone, snorting in the auditorium). Even the usual 'quiet… quiet… LOUD' moments, evoking a purely physical response rather than a psychological one, have little effect when they sporadically appear.
Credit where its due, there are two great shots in the film. The first is the little girl running at the door (as in the trailer), and the second one involves a demon crouching, quite still, in a darkened stairwell. It's perhaps telling that the film only succeeds when it's either going full-belt or doing as little as possible, because everything else in the film occupies a middle-ground of lazy writing and half-arsed performances. There's a point, at about thirty minutes in, where you think 'Well, in order for the Annabelle doll to have the formidable reputation it's got in The Conjuring (which only takes place a year later), surely no-one's going to be left alive at the end of this film?'.
I have never been so disappointed at a happy ending, frankly.
You know you're in trouble when the best thing about a movie is the snigger travelling around the room when a UK audience sees a second-long shot of L.A.'s Gaylord Apartments.
Yes, I sniggered, too. Me mordere.
The trailer's actually slightly better than the film, but only just.
Well, I laughed.
Judging by the audience in Screen 1 tonight, not even close.
The film will be ineffectual no matter how/where you see it.
I don't think I have to answer that question.
I don't think I have to answer that one, either.
There isn't.
Really, though? Really? Do we get another spinoff about The Cult Of The Ram, next?
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
