PG-13, 1 hr. 42 min. Directed By: James Wan. Release Date:
Apr 1, 2011. DVD Release Date: Jul 12, 2011.
After reading a LOT of reviews of Insidious, from both amateur and
professional critics, I decided to give this movie a pass in the theaters. My general rule of thumb is that if I can’t
find an equal number of positive and negative reviews (or something very close
to that), that I skip the movie, and maybe check it out on streaming or
DVD. At $8 a pop, I generally figure
that I should see movies I have an actual shot at enjoying, and Insidious was getting grapefruits lobbed
at it from all corners.
I’m going to say this hesitantly, and
with explanation, but I didn’t quite hate this movie. Let that sink in, and here’s my
explanation: until they go absolutely
nuts with that whole love child of Saw and
Paranormal Activity (which I learned
is exactly what happened here, since the “creative” team behind this came from
both of those movies and borrowed heavily from each to create Insidious), I thought this was based on
realistic fears, or at least they are scares that I’ve had happen to me
before.
The face in the window. Admit it, we’ve all been somewhere when it
happened to us. We were moving around
through a house and someone scares the absolute hell out of us
unintentionally. When I was a kid, there
was a floodlight in my backyard, and I remember the night that I saw someone’s
shadow on my bedroom curtains. Unfortunately,
this was during the Richard Ramirez/Nightstalker scare, and I lived in LA, so
it was a problem. I’m not sure who was
in my backyard, but I knew then that it wasn’t anyone who was supposed to be
there. I’m also pretty sure now that it
wasn’t Richard Ramirez. Seeing the face
in the window here on several occasions was disturbing and netted the desired
jump from me.
The alarm and the open door. If you have an alarm system, it brings you
peace of mind… until it goes off for no apparent reason at 3am and you find
your garage door ajar. Then, it freaks
you right the @#!* out. When I was
caring for my dad in 2009, those events actually happened to me. I was asleep, and then the warning drone woke
me up a split second before the real siren began to wail. So, the scene where Patrick Wilson and Rose
Byrne are sitting in bed talking and their alarm starts going off hit
home. I know that fear. It was creepy to watch.
But… here’s the rub. What we have here is a (slightly) more
intelligent remake of Paranormal Activity,
which, if I can quote Roger from American
Dad, is “not an American movie classic.”
The story lines are nearly identical, the ideas and scares all come from
the same basic place. Both movies even
have the same strong point, the rising action.
Both movies have the same weakness, which is hashing out the paranormal
to such an extent that I started yawning… or when the “psychic” brought out the
gas mask at the séance, laughing and cracking “Dalton, I am your father”
jokes. The writers worked TOO hard to
convince us of the paranormal “science” involved in their movie to make it fun.
They had me for all of thirty minutes,
and the day after I watched this, I refused to investigate strange sounds coming from
my balcony. My rationale was that I live
on the third floor and the only person who might be on my balcony would be
Spider-Man. The reality was I didn’t
want to crack the blinds and find someone staring back at me.
On a side note: Horror’s well, it’s kind of a bitch for me to
write about it. I think I’ve said this
before, and I’ve seen other bloggers (especially those who consider themselves
“critics” rather than “reviewers”) get too wrapped up in their heads when they
watch horror. Horror is visceral. We’re supposed to FEEL it, not think away the
scare. Those cheap scares are going to
be effective if you take your brain out of the equation. When I write about a movie like this, I’m
totally not looking at the technical aspects of the film, unless they’re so
poorly done that it detracts from the scare quality. If you go in to horror and you’re looking at
the minutiae, of course you’re not going to be scared. Horror’s a big picture event, not something
where you can get lost in the trappings.
Expect a bad movie with a few decent scares or pulse-racing events, and
you’ll find yourself disappointed less often.
