Your dead soul is killing his living skin.

Insidious: Chapter 2

(2013)

(SPOILERS) James Wan was quite busy last year, what with having two fright flicks released and crossing over to the action genre to begin shooting Fast & Furious 7 (only recently completed due to Paul Walker’s untimely demise). That he made two horror pictures in a fairly short space of time (this and The Conjuring) speaks volumes about his precise, methodical approach. Insidious: Chapter 2 is a well made but cookie cutter affair, so formulaic and calculated it’s difficult to get remotely worked up by it’s made-to-order shock tactics.

Everyone’s back, pretty much, including at least one dead person (Lin Shaye as paranormal investigator Elise Rainier) and events pick up directly after the first instalment, with Lorraine (Rose Byrne) being interviewed by police about Elise’s murder. If that scene looks as if it might send the picture in a less obvious direction (law enforcement and spooks), it proves not to be. It’s clear that Josh (Patrick Wilson) is under suspicion, not just from the police but also from Lorraine. But Wan and screenwriter (also playing nerdy investigator Specs) Leigh Whannell promptly drop what could be an interesting tack. The police investigations rule out Josh (somehow, the marks on the corpse don’t match Josh’s hands) and Lorraine enters a state of self-denial about what has happened to her hubby. Both developments are disappointing; the pushing of the police to the periphery stains credulity, while Byrne is very badly served with a character who spends most of the movie wandering about her mother-in-law’s house all on edge and not seeing the bleeding obvious.

Most of the Lambert family plot is treading water while investigators Specs and Tucker (Angus Sampson), now accompanied by old friend of Elise Carl (Steve Coulter), trace the background of whatever it is that has been haunting Josh. Wan and Whannell dig deep into their bag of tricks, which include Dutch angles, repeated (and increasingly tiresome) instances of characters not seeing what another character sees (the old “There’s someone standing behind you” line), variants on the same (oblivious Dalton – Ty Simpkins – doesn’t realise he is not talking to his brother down the tin can telephone, even though its blatantly obvious to us), quiet punctuated by sudden noise, nursery rhymes used to sinister effect, children’s toys (this time a play walker) turning themselves off and moving of their own accord. Horror movies work to a great extent on the basis of tried-and-tested scares and devices, but they don’t have to be quite so relentlessly blatant and undemanding. The picture has Josh being super sinister and slowly decomposing (“Your dead soul is killing his living skin”) and Lorraine terribly useless, until eventually the investigators show up.

There is an occasional nice idea, in amongst the clockwork plotting. The opening scene is set in 1986, and places a mystery (who is young Josh speaking to on the video playback) that has an effective WTF? pay off. The ability of Josh to time travel in The Further is just about the only interesting aspect of this other realm, which Wan seems to recognise has limited shelf life; he doesn’t spend nearly as long there this time out. Discovering that the haunter is your common-or-garden serial killer with a Norman Bates mommy fixation is distinctly underwhelming (mommy bears a passing resemblance to the operatic one from Shakespear's Sister, but with Siobhan's make-up). Naturally, there are bodies stacked up in a hidden room. It isn’t clear why the mother of Parker Crane (the killer) should lead them to her son’s house, masquerading as the non-corporeal Eloise. Apart from to give Wan an obvious but effective reveal (“I’m not who you thought I was”; see also the telephone cans above), that is. The device of shaking word-dice to communicate with the dead is quite neat, however, even if it leads to some rather daft scenes (“What is Parker Crane holding behind his back?”; er, now let me take a wild guess).

In fact, much of the third act is rather awkward. The Further must be visited, and it’s nice to see Eloise again, but the threat in the corporeal house is rote, as Josh goes all Jack Torrance on his family. It makes no sense that he wouldn’t kill Carl, Specs and Tucker as he’s intent on murdering his own family. I guess it means the trio of investigators can return for Chapter 3, however. Which is out next year, sans the Lambert family (it’s slightly surprising that, after all this hassle, their arch nemesis can be despatched by beating her with a chair), and has Whannell making his directorial debut. He’s writing again, of course, which means there will be lousy lines like Josh’s, as he discusses how good it is to feel pain again; “I miss it, but not as much as I miss inflicting it on others”. Whannell isn’t going to win a Best Original Screenplay Oscar any time soon.

**1/2

Comments

So you made contact with the French operative?

Atomic Blonde (2017)
(SPOILERS) Well, I can certainly see why Focus Features opted to change the title from The Coldest City (the name of the graphic novel from which this is adapted). The Coldest City evokes a nourish, dour, subdued tone, a movie of slow-burn intrigue in the vein of John Le Carré. Atomic Blonde, to paraphrase its introductory text, is not that movie. As such, there’s something of a mismatch here, of the kind of Cold War tale it has its roots in and the furious, pop-soaked action spectacle director David Leitch is intent on turning it into. In the main, his choices succeed, but the result isn’t quite the clean getaway of his earlier (co-directed) John Wick.

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

I take Quaaludes 10-15 times a day for my "back pain", Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, part to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine... Well, because it's awesome.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Along with Pain & Gain and The Great Gatsby, The Wolf of Wall Street might be viewed as the completion of a loose 2013 trilogy on the subject of success and excess; the American Dream gone awry. It’s the superior picture to its fellows, by turns enthralling, absurd, outrageous and hilarious. This is the fieriest, most deliriously vibrant picture from the director since the millennium turned. Nevertheless, stood in the company of Goodfellas, the Martin Scorsese film from which The Wolf of Wall Street consciously takes many of its cues, it is found wanting.

I was vaguely familiar with the title, not because I knew much about Jordan Belfort but because the script had been in development for such a long time (Ridley Scott was attached at one time). So part of the pleasure of the film is discovering how widely the story diverges from the Wall Street template. “The Wolf of Wall Street” suggests one who towers over the city like a behemoth, rather than a guy …

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

Dude. You’re my hero and shit.

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)
(SPOILERS) I was going to say I’d really like to see what Vince Gilligan has up his sleeve besidesBreaking Bad spinoffs. But then I saw that he had a short-lived series on CBS a few years back (Battle Creek). I guess things Breaking Bad-related ensure an easy greenlight, particularly from Netflix, for whom the original show was bread and butter in its take up as a streaming platform. There’s something slightly dispiriting about El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, though. Not that Gilligan felt the need to return to Jesse Pinkman – although the legitimacy of that motive is debatable – but the desire to re-enter and re-inhabit the period of the show itself, as if he’s unable to move on from a near-universally feted achievement and has to continually exhume it and pick it apart.

You ever heard the saying, “Don’t rob the bank across from the diner that has the best donuts in three counties”?

2 Guns (2013)
(SPOILERS) Denzel Washington is such a reliable performer, that it can get a bit boring. You end up knowing every gesture or inflection in advance, whether he’s playing a good guy or a bad guy. And his films are generally at least half decent, so you end up seeing them. Even in Flight (or perhaps especially in Flight; just watch him chugging down that vodka) where he’s giving it his Oscar-nominatable best, he seems too familiar. I think it may be because he’s an actor who is more effective the less he does. In 2 Guns he’s not doing less, but sometimes it seems like it. That’s because the last person I’d ever expect blows him off the screen; Mark Wahlberg.

Who would want to be stuck in a dream for ten years?

Top 10 Films 2010-19
Now, you may glance down the following and blanche at its apparent Yankophile and populist tendencies. I wouldn’t seek to claim, however, that my tastes are particularly prone to treading on the coat tails of the highbrow. And there’s always the cahiers du cinema list if you want an appreciation of that ilk. As such, near misses for the decade, a decade that didn’t feature all that many features I’d rank as unqualified classics, included Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Tron: Legacy, The Tree of Life, The Guard and Edge of Tomorrow.

Don’t make me… hungry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m… hungry.

The Incredible Hulk (2008)
(SPOILERS) It’s fortunate the bookends of Marvel’s Phase One are so sturdy, as the intervening four movies simply aren’t that special. Mediocre might be too strong a word (although at least one qualifies for that status), but they amountto a series of at-best-serviceable vehicles for characters rendered on screen with varying degrees of nervousness and second guessing. They also underline that, through the choices of directors, no one was bigger than the franchise, and no one had more authority than supremo Kevin Feige. Which meant there was integrity of overall vision, but sometimes a paucity of it in cinematic terms. The Incredible Hulk arrived off the back of what many considered a creative failure and commercial disappointment from Ang Lee five years earlier yet managed on just about every level to prove itself Hulk’s inferior. A movie characterised by playing it safe, it’s now very much the unloved orphan of the MCU, with a lead actor recast and a main c…

The only things I care about in this goddamn life are me and my drums... and you.

Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)
(SPOILERS) The final entry in John Hughes’ teen cycle – after this he’d be away with the adults and moppets, and making an untold fortune from criminal slapstick – is also his most patently ridiculous, and I’m not forgetting Weird Science. Not because of its unconvincing class commentary, although that doesn’t help, but because only one of its teenage leads was under 25 when the movie came out, and none of them were Michael J Fox, 30-passing-for-15 types. That all counts towards its abundant charm, though; it’s almost as if Some Kind of Wonderful is intentionally coded towards the broader pool Hughes would subsequently plunge into (She’s Having a Baby was released the same year). Plus, its indie soundtrack is every bit as appealing as previous glories The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink.

Mention of the latter highlights Some Kind of Wonderful’s greatest boast; it’s a gender swapped Pretty in Pink, only this time Hughes (and his directing surrogate Howard…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog