Insidious Is....Disappointing.

     Insidious was supposed to be one of the scariest and well written horror films this year, and it unfortunately failed at both.  I say that with a heavy heart, because I was rooting for this film the minute I walked into the theater.  I even posted the trailer on this blog two weeks ago!  I have been waiting for years for a movie to scare the crap out of me.  If director James Wan had made the entire movie exactly like the first 53 minutes, he would have struck gold, taken horror back to its roots, and I would be sleeping with a nightlight for the next three weeks.  We all would've won.

    Insidious is about a boy named Dalton who slips into a suspicious coma after falling in the upstairs attic, and leaves his parents wondering if he is really in a coma at all.  It deals with spirits that are not haunting a house, but tormenting a body whose inhabitant has been lost in a realm known as "The Further".  Yeah, I know, I liked the first sentence a lot more too.  The first half of the movie was fantastically creepy, and delivered a few very good jumps.  Just from the title screen and score alone, you can tell that James Wan (director/writer of the first and only decent Saw movie) wanted to put contemporary horror back into a shell of good old-school horror.   

    But around the half-way point, it's all downhill from there.  The acting fizzles out (Rose Byrne needs to take screaming lessons from the chic in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and the story / effects become laughable.  I had a real problem with the film's portrayal of The Devil, who is the strongest spirit vying for control of Dalton's body.  First of all, what is up with the producers of Paranomal Activity and their fetish with Lucifer?  And why does he always have hooves???  Please, someone explain this to me.  Secondly, what should have been very macabre and completely terrifying instead came off as vaudevillian and very cheap.  There were a lot of details that never get explained either.  I could use this script as a strainer it had so many plot holes.

 

  

  Many are claiming this movie ripped off several older horror films, from Nightmare on Elm Street to Poltergeist.  Several of these claims are legitimate, but people need to understand that horror is a genre notoriously known for similar archetypes throughout the decades.  What bothered me most was that this really could have been a great film.  It really could have been scary.  It just...wasn't.  My advice?  Rent it on DVD and watch the first half, then ask someone how it ends.  Trust me, their explanation will be more exciting.  

Note:  If you are looking for a very creepy movie about parents trying to find/reach their child in supernatural circumstances, Guillermo Del Toro's The Orphanage is for you.