The best thing, worst thing, and main thing about the horror sequel “Insidious: Chapter 2” in about the time it takes to watch the trailer.
REVIEW TEXT
Dear horror film makers, if the audience is laughing at the points you want them to be scared, you may not quite be nailing the tone.
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“Insidious: Chapter 2” is the sequel to 2011’s “Insidious” and picks off right where the last one left off. With more spirit world shenanigans torturing the life of one family just trying to get a good night’s sleep. It brings back most of the original cast including Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne who guide their family through this ordeal and try to make sense of a dark history in their personal lives. The original Insidious was a surprise hit, using deftly woven scares to propel a surprising story to a tension filled climax, so of course to follow that up, let’s do the exact opposite!
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Now before we get to how this movie falls apart, lets start with what actually works. (This should take long) Patrick Wilson. There that’s about it. I mean, I guess there might be a few scary moments to look forward to in this if you are a horror fan, but overall for me, Mr. Wilson was the only thing worth praising. His portrayal of this father falling apart was somehow almost believable even as everything around him seemed utterly fake and misapplied. Speaking of fake and misapplied. I swear, in this movie I saw two fake beards. FAKE BEARDS?! I mean that’s like high school play level incompetence to not even glue a beard on right. Of course I could be wrong and these actors actually grow facial hair that looks like a poorly applied fake beard, but wow.
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and that’s just an example of how this movie falls completely apart. It’s hard to be scared when you’re laughing at how bad something is. There were at least a half dozen times someone in my theater laughed at points of the movie where they were trying to scare us! Whether it was the horrible crafted and delivered dialogue, or the ham fisted over the top effects, the unintentional comedy on this one seemed high to me. and even worse, in the second half of the film they started going for the actual INTENTIONAL comedy with a pair of bumbling ghost hunters that made me feel more like I was watching Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein than anything that could have been called insidious. Prat falls? Really? You’re going to do prat falls in your horror movie? Whatever the case, all of this humor wether it was intended or not completely derails any tension the film’s story might have accrued.
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Late in the movie one of the characters, upon entering a creepy home says, as if he is saying something extremely clever “Let’s just say this house didn’t have a lot of good things happen in it.” and you know what, neither did this movie. Insidious Chapter 2 is a D+
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