Ray Liotta in a role that will surprise you.

Breaking Dumb.

THE CURSE OF LA LLORONA is not one of those horror movies where the first Act is ominous and it falls apart as it reels toward a dumb climax; no, this movie breaks dumb from its opening frames, with the very event that defines its curse – in 1673, a Mexican mother drowns her two children, after discovering her husband is having an affair—wait, wouldn’t it make more sense to drown your husband? Or even his lover? We shake our head and continue… it seems this curses the woman to roam the Earth as a ghost in a wedding dress (reason? No reason), seeking out other children to drown (reason? No reason).

There are many variants of this tale, but this is the version they present here. Apparently, Mexican mothers scare their children with La Llorona to keep them indoors.

LOS ANGELES 1973: Linda Cardellini is widowed social worker Anna, with two young kids Chris (Roman Christou) and Sam (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen). Anna is sent to check on a mother whose kids have been missing school, and discovers the Mexican mother, Patricia (Patricia Velasquez), has locked the boys in a closet, claiming she is protecting them from a “weeping woman.” The kids are taken to hospital, the mother to a holding cell.

Later, Patricia’s kids are found drowned. Patricia blames Anna, and will later admit that she prayed to La Llorona to bring her own boys back and take Anna’s children instead. Oh, so the ghost answers prayers, as Llorona starts terrorizing Anna’s kids immediately, with every horror movie cliché ever: thumps, dripping water, cracked mirrors, dark rooms, orchestra stabs, wrist grabs, door slams, doors ajar, doors flying open, appearing around corners, through windows, at bath time; able to teleport, yet has trouble with locked doors…

Father Perez (Tony Amendola, from ANNABELLE, which is in THE CONJURING Universe) recommends Anna hire an ex-priest, Rafael (Raymond Cruz – Tuco from BREAKING BAD!) to sort out her supernatural meth cooking—I mean, occurrences.

•  There is contention on whether this movie IS, in fact, part of THE CONJURING universe, because its own director, Michael Chaves, denies it. Which raises the question: Is Father Perez here because he’s connecting the universes, or because there are No More Fucken Actors?
• Also: Rafael is an EX-priest and is now a shaman because…? Jesus was too weak, and the pagan arts are stronger against evil?

Yet even the intensity of Tuco can’t save this jumpscare slop. Maybe if he didn’t keep changing his story: at first, he says La Llorona has “attached herself to your family, not your house,” and then goes about guarding the house with his shaman talismans – eggs and rice and beans and oils – wait, is he purifying the house or cooking breakfast?

His efforts don’t seem to matter either way, as Llorona isn’t too focused on her job of drowning Anna’s kids. She physically puts her hands on Anna’s little girl, Sam, in the bathtub, starts drowning her – and then just stops; she grabs the children and flings them across rooms, then lets them run away; she winds down windows and slams doors and appears in any room they are in, yet never gets around to finishing the job. And despite all of Tuco’s amulets and incantations, Llorona just wanders the house freely, turning up in rooms protected by Tuco’s breakfast like none of it means squat.  Tuco says “the light keeps her away,” so lights hundreds of candles – which Llorona simply… blows out. (How about turning on an electric light, Edison?). No rules, no logic, no investment – it’s magic who cares fuck you.

LA LLORONA is produced by horror wonderboy James Wan, who brings along his eerie composer Joseph Bishara, but new writers Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Jaconis are not doing these veterans any favors, simply copying and pasting from Horror For Dummies.

This movie’s R-rating is solely due to the fact that children are imperiled. No swearing, nudity, or Disney messaging. A more horrifying plot would’ve been the social worker’s kids being run through the same system that the social worker puts other people’s kids through. When Llorona grabbed Anna’s boy, she left marks on his wrist, and Anna was investigated by her own company. There was no follow-through after Anna hired Tuco, but imagine if the filmmakers had followed that throughline – a hard X rating for Adult Bureaucracy, Psychologically Detrimental, and definitely Imperiling Children like no ghost could possibly imagine.

END

Paradise by the Jump-Scare Light.

If this movie didn’t have jump-scares, it wouldn’t have any scares at all.

Clichéd Haunted Houses Monthly awarded THE CONJURING its highest honor: “Best Movie With A Middle-American Family Moving Into An Obvious Haunted House Where Murders Were Committed.” The movie was also given a plaque by the Organization For Jump-Scares And Orchestra Stabs, with a special write-up and Behind The Scenes link on the website www.MoviesThatRipoff-THE-EXORCIST-Blatantly.com.

I think my job here is done…

Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga star as Ed and Lorraine Warren, paranormal investigators (meaning they don’t have a real job), who must conduct an exorcism (meaning ‘read Latin and gesticulate’) for a family where a demon has possessed the mother and is trying to kill her daughter (meaning mom’s having a nervous breakdown and blaming ghosts again).

The most tragic aspect of this supposedly true 1971 horror story is that Ed and Lorraine Warren really do exist. They’ve been on the con since at least 1952, with the founding of their New England Society for Psychic Research, driving out intangible entities for some very tangible cash. Movie opens with one of their high profile cases – that of Annabelle, a doll which terrorized a family until Ed and Lorraine trapped it in a glass case of emotion. (I guess demons have a hard time navigating through glass.) This first sequence pummels us with classic primal terrors, like hearing banging on a locked door, opening it and seeing nothing but a lifeless doll outside. This whole sequence is unrelated to the story proper, serving to introduce Ed’s and Lorraine’s talents on their lecture tour.

Then we meet Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor as Roger and Carolyn Perron, who move into a capacious country house with their five daughters, the youngest channeling Drew Barrymore lispily. Out comes the Hollywood Haunted House Handbook and writers Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes proceed to con the viewer into thinking this movie is original and real, as the Warrens conned the populace into thinking their “powers” were original and real.

James Wan, a very talented writer and director, helms the project with a sure hand, but achieves nothing noteworthy, constructing situations and scares by the numbers: house extremely cold, all clocks stopping at 3:07 a.m., horrible smells, doors slamming, little kid talking to imaginary friend, music box, hidden basement, rocking chair, hanging tree, legs being pulled while sleeping, infrared photos, voices on tapes, sleepwalking, disfigured spirits… the list goes on and on, hitting every single horror movie trope, in a quest to out-cliché them all!

In the final scenes, when Carolyn is fully possessed, with everyone screaming to hold her down, while Ed is screaming in Latin at her, movie has derailed completely. We wonder why Carolyn is tied to a chair with a sheet over her, but soon realize why, as she is levitated all over the place and thrown bodily across the room – oh right, Lili Taylor didn’t want to do these stunts, and it was too hard to disguise the stuntperson, so they just covered the stuntperson with a sheet. Awesome solution, James. The screaming in Latin continues.

Suddenly, the Warrens’ little girl is under threat. Ed and Lorraine’s daughter, a minor character, far removed from the main action, being watched by granny over at the Warrens’ house, is being tempted into their “Museum” of evil artifacts, where Annabelle the doll is trying to navigate past her glass case of emotion. Is this the same entity possessing Carolyn, or is it Annabelle? But I thought Annabelle had no more influence over anyone from behind that glass? Who knows? All that happens is, it diverts our attention from the main story, and loses our emotional involvement. Why did Wan set up two climaxes like this? Well, remember this movie is some sort of love letter to the Warrens, so it sought to make the entity feel threatened by them, so it terrorized their daughter as a distraction to the exorcism. (Did the entity get a peek at Ed’s address in his wallet, or has it been following Ed for awhile now?)

There’s a tragic backstory to the house and its inhabitants, involving sacrificing babies and suicide-hanging at the tree, but it all leads to the same jump-scares, so should we award any points?

Ed and Lorraine Warren.
Real charlatans investigating an unreal world.

“Psychics” Ed and Lorraine Warren are the real evil here.

This movie might have been a mediocre date-night horror diversion, but the fact the filmmakers are selling it as the “true story of the Warrens” is infuriating, since they are charlatans who have built an empire of nothingness on the backs of the  gullible. The movie itself becomes a tribute to two con artists!

“Investigating” over 10,000 cases, if only the Warrens had integrity like Harry Houdini or James Randi, and used their knowledge of charlatanism to explain supposedly supernatural phenomena and/or debunk supposed hauntings. Instead, they bilked traumatized people out of money, and both went to their graves (Ed in 2006, Lorraine in 2019) maintaining their avocation was real. However, their deaths proved conclusively – and ironically – that they lacked all credibility in life.

Think about it: for two people who knew ALL the incantations and demon-names and rituals and rules of the after-life dimension, they never found a way back themselves!

END

“I guess the joke’s on me. I tried breaking my legs to get out of this production,
but they just wrote it into the script!”

Back to the Further.

I saw a man that was choking there,
I guess he couldn’t breathe…
— Alice Cooper, “The Ballad Of Dwight Fry.”

Old lady wanders around in darkness. Gets startled by people trying to kill her. Is this INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 3 or a visit to Granny’s?

Quinn (Stefanie Scott) is a sweet, smooth teen whose mother has just died, and Quinn would like to speak to her again. (Uh, someone should really explain “death” to this chick.) She visits retired old psychic Elise (Lin Shaye), who proclaims she doesn’t visit “the other side” anymore because it’s too dangerous. Whereupon she visits the other side, wanders around in darkness, is attacked, and comes back saying she’s never going to do that again.

Dermot Mulroney is Cool Dad, Quinn’s widower father, who becomes alarmed for Quinn when oily footprints start attacking her in the night. They seek out Elise again, who says she doesn’t visit “the other side” because it’s too dangerous. Whereupon she visits the other side, wanders around in darkness, is attacked, and comes back saying she’s never going to do that again. Am I sensing a pattern here?

She reports that waiting on the other side is a Man Who Can’t Breathe (Michael Reid MacKay, dandied up in mummy attire with a breath mask), who Vaders around in the fifth dimension and tries to drag salubrious Quinn in with him, being all insidious about it. Finding a crack in the dimension when Quinn called out to her dead mother, he’s trying to force his presence into Quinn so he can breathe again. That’s not so wrong, is it? Although, even with his current incorporeal ectoplasmic insubstantiation, he’s still doing a bangup job of leaving oily footprints, grabbing people, possessing people and ruining Dermot Mulroney’s serious drama career.

Hooray! Clothes have souls too. And so do scarves!

Also, there’s a bride in black trying to kill Elise. Reason? I wasn’t listening.

INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 3 retains none of the ominous creep of the film that started the series in 2011. This one is a “prequel” (and we know what that means, n.b. refer to THE PHANTOM MENACE) and subsequently busies itself with inserting all those sign posts that will lead us to INSIDIOUS (i.e. the bride in black, the meeting of Elise and the two comic relief paranormal investigators, etc.)

Leigh Whannell, writer of the first two INSIDIOUS chapters, now takes on writing, directing and acting. A triple threat, who does a good job on this stock horror movie that is not so much frightening as silly. Alongside his stockier buddy Tucker (Angus Sampson), he is called in as the Plan B paranormal team when Elise visits the other side for the third time, wanders around in darkness, is attacked, and comes back saying she’s never going to do that again. Whannell is the Gilligan to Tucker’s Skipper – for all the comic relief we don’t really need in this film struggling to find a tone, although he does manage to eke out a story which is a cut above CHAPTER 2.

Besides the crazy old neighbors, the boy who has a crush on Quinn and a small silent cameo for Ele Keats as Mom, there is also a love interest for wrinkled old Elise – a dead husband – whom she will encounter in the dark places she keeps wandering like a granny with dementia. Elise calls the dark dimension “The Further,” which is apparently a name she makes up off the top of her head. And we thought granny was getting better…

CHAPTER 3 suffers greatly from the absence of Rose Byrne and Ty Simpkins. Not so much Patrick Wilson, who “indicated” his way through CHAPTER 2 like a novice… And every time they say The Man Who Can’t Breathe, all I think about is Alice Cooper in a straitjacket.

After a relatively serious tone, movie ends with silly jocularity that folds it neatly into the first INSIDIOUS movie, as Elise jovially tells her two new paranormal pals that they should go into business together, and to start wearing ties, and walks off with them arm in arm. Just like the oily footprints on the hardwood floors, it leaves us feeling dirty, after visiting the other side, wandering around in darkness, being attacked, and coming back saying we’re never going to do that again.

END

In-Silly-ous.

Taking for granted the world has seen INSIDIOUS, writer Leigh Whannell and co-writer/director James Wan drop us into INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 2 like step-children being dropped off in the woods to fend for ourselves or die.

If you haven’t seen INSIDIOUS, you’re in for a treat of characters you don’t know appearing in places you never saw doing things you don’t care about.

The main cast return to pee their pants: Patrick Wilson as dad Josh (who gets to stare sinisterly from under his brow a lot), Rose Byrne as mom Renai (who screams a lot), Ty Simpkins as son Dalton, with The Gift (whatever that is, we’ll just have to find out the hard way), and Barbara Hershey as Josh’s MILF mom.

The family has moved into Mom’s place while “their house is being fixed” (again, for reasons we’ll never know – unless we watched INSIDIOUS). Thankfully, Mom lives in an upper class sprawling old chateau with lots of upstairs, downstairs, basement and attic for ghosts to skulk in and people to get chased around, instead of in a trailer park or a two-bedroom apartment where the neighbors just wouldn’t stand for all that hijinks.

The two investigators from the last film (Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson) return for comic relief. And a new paranormal investigator joins the cast to make things more confusing, Steve Coulter as Carl, whose forte is throwing lettered dice to make the ghosts spell out their messages. Better than twitter.

INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 2 is well written and produced, with a few eerie passages, yet is not a stand-alone film and feels disjointed and incomplete; the unestablished characters are a big part of that discomfiture, as they walk around looking through ajar doors into dark rooms and cellars. Amidst the loud noises, peripheral visions and jump scares, the plot involves the police investigating whether Josh killed the psychic old bat from the last movie (Lin Shaye as Elise). So the focus has shifted off the boy Dalton (who was possessed in the last film), and cast onto the father Josh. Yet they try to retain that youth angle, as we see Josh as a boy in flashbacks, being terrorized by an unknown entity.

There are also more physical “ghosts” here: instead of being eerie, this many apparitions walking around in whiteface and Avril Lavigne mascara just reminds us there’s a makeup trailer out the back somewhere. When a woman specter appears to Renai and slaps her, screaming, “Don’t you dare!”, the intent is to create mystery with the ghost’s enigmatic line – but when it is so obvious the ghost is just a woman in ghoulish makeup, we just shake our heads and call Avril Lavigne.

There’s a backstory of a boy’s mistreatment which made him kill people for his mother (–cough–PSYCHO). And that psychic old bat Elise is now a ghost in the spirit world! At last – logic! Of course in a world where ghosts exist, if one of the living characters dies, they should also become a ghost. So they contact Elise with a séance and Carl’s rolling dice.

Carl raises a lantern in the other dimension and ominously states, “Into the Further we go!” Another example of disjointed screenwriting. Elise called the ghost world The Further in the previous movie, but in this movie, we never hear that term until now. Which I’m sure prompted many confused viewers to exclaim, “What the Further?” Ghost Elise proclaims, “I’ve seen the Better Place but came back because I heard you calling.” Royt… That Better Place couldn’t have been that much “better.” Thankfully, the wrinkly old charlatan is wearing her ghost clothes! (I constantly question that same ignorant, incomprehensible concept in every single ghost movie: Why are ghosts dressed? Isn’t the ghost the supposed “soul” of the human? Isn’t the soul an incorporeal wraith? And if the soul does choose to manifest itself comprehensibly, what does it draw on to put clothes onto its ethereal form? Or do clothes have ghosts too? And the ghosts of the clothes just automatically appear with their owner?)

As they did with their SAW franchise, Whannell and Wan make a decision to link this movie inextricably with its predecessor. They reshoot some of the inexplicable apparition scenes from the last film from the point of view of the inexplicable apparitions. Thusly, though these scenes display real storytelling adroitness, inexplicable terror, once explained, becomes not terror. INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 2 becomes more of a thriller than a horror story. And all Avril Lavigne breaks loose.

END

“Do we have to do this in the dark? The spirit dimension knows we have electricity, right?”

Not Normally this Para.

Uh-oh. I need to turn on the lights…

INSIDIOUS is one of the few modern horror films that is truly scary. Not many movies can hold your nerves hostage like THE EXORCIST or THE OMEN, but INSIDIOUS comes close, with atmospheric direction, blood-chilling sequences and lots of screeching violins.

A family with three kids moves into a rambling house in Middle America – the type with hardwood floors, high ceilings and a dark attic that practically screams, “Hey, look at me! I’m haunted!”

Patrick Wilson (WATCHMEN) is father Josh, Rose Byrne is mother Renai (sans her baby fat as Brad’s plaything in TROY, 2004). Their little boy Dalton (Ty Simpkins) has an accident in the attic and goes into a coma that doctors can’t explain. Months pass. When Renai tucks in Dalton’s little brother, he whimpers to her one night about comatose Dalton in the next room, “I don’t like it when he walks around at night.”

Blood chills. Hairs rise. Cities fall.

Written by Leigh Whannell and directed by James Wan (the twisted Australian duo who brought us SAW), INSIDIOUS kicks us in the ribs with classic horror iconography: loud noises, doors opening by themselves, apparitions, whispers on a baby monitor… some beautiful scares – like the unclear vision of the Dickensian boy through the window dancing to Tiptoe Through the Tulips. Only thing scarier is Tiny Tim.

INSIDIOUS channels POLTERGEIST fiercely – and though we might call that movie a classic today, even POLTERGIEST did get a little kooky in its third act. Remember all the Hollywood commotion in the final scenes, skeletons popping up in the pool, the house disappearing in some kind of vortex, and the elf woman with the voice that sounded like she was sucking helium?… So too INSIDIOUS cannot live up to its razor-burning first half, although it does retain enough ectoplasm for a wild ride to a satisfying surprise conclusion.

Like most horror films, INSIDIOUS does not survive its “explanation” phase. As per Horror Protocol, a suitably wizened old woman psychic (or medium, or charlatan, or whatever they’re called) provides the prosaic explanation behind Dalton’s coma: as the POLTERGEIST Helium Elf called the other dimension “The Light,” the INSIDIOUS psychic (Lin Shaye) calls it “The Further” and explains that Dalton is actually astral traveling there, while demons are trying to use his inert body as a vessel to squeeze their bad selves into our dimension…

Royt…

Which brings up all those usual questions I have for psychics, mediums, charlatans, whatever: Why don’t the demons just come through and be done with it, instead of poking around half-heartedly by leaving bloodied handprints on sheets and speaking through baby monitors? Are they trying to possess Dalton? Is he going to turn into a maniac axe-murderer inbred hillbilly? Why murder people if they only wind up in heaven? Isn’t that undermining your whole demonic task of bringing them to hell? Why bother “scaring” them at all? Wouldn’t demons from another dimensional plane consider simple Earthbound scares below their dignity? And in the noisy climactic scenes, ghosts try to cross into this world by busting out of a closet – and a man obstructs their paranormal entrance into our dimension by holding the closet door closed! Really? That’s all it takes? I thought ghosts could go through things… Can we get a Demonic Infiltration Rulebook up in this haunted hizzouse?

“Are you people nuts? Go take your Republican Convention somewhere else!”

And then – the perennial séance. Why in the dark? Does the absence of light really affect inter-dimensional contact? Human eyes can only pick up a miniscule section of the electromagnetic spectrum – between 4000 to 7000 angstroms – that we call “visible light,” so how could it possibly affect entities that can obviously communicate along a much wider bandwidth (and who are from a dimension where everything is supposedly so frickin’ bright)? I’ll tell you “why in the dark?” Because all those unsophisticates who handed down ghost stories from yore figured it would be scarier. How I love scientific explanations…

Writer Leigh Whannell plays one of two paranormal investigator dorks, whose funny appearance in the film is at a point where some levity is welcomed after heart-skipping scares – but his presence also presages the wizened woman and the unneeded “explanations.”

From the outset, the main drawback of INSIDIOUS is its PG-13 rating (we know they’re allowed to say “fuck” but once and are only allowed concepts that won’t overwhelm your average Lindsay Lohan fan), so with that hobbling, we realize what a good job the filmmakers did to make those hairs rise on your mammalian body. Point the finger at Joseph Bishara‘s eerie, evocative music.

Funniest (or most ignorant) by-product of movies like INSIDIOUS is that the slapstick mongoloids who call themselves “ghost hunters” notice all the made-up “paranormal” detection devices onscreen and believe that they can actually construct this bogus equipment – at the very least, name some glorified toaster the same name as that apparatus in the movie and presto! Instant Ghost Detection Device! Which says more about the pants-wetter who is using it than the device itself.

The first half of the movie gives you The Fear – that notion of the inexplicable; half-seen visions with no point other than an abiding alienness; the second half is for ghost hunters with weak bladders (that would be all of them, no?).

If I, a nullifidian cucumber far above the superstitious beliefs of afterlife, angels and demons, needed to sleep with the lights on after this effective movie, I shudder to think how hellish this movie must be on those pants-wetters. Look behind you, ghost hunter. It’s waiting for you in the dark.

END