Insidious: Chapter 3 (Leigh Whannell) [Archive]

Henry Gale

06-10-2015, 05:53 AM

With the exception of an awkward cameo that puts him on screen for a few seconds, Wan's absence is really felt here.

Gone is the delirium of the goofy unexpectedness that made the first two such varied (and often riveting) funhouse rides that allowed them to stand out from so many other haunting-horror movies of recent years. Chapter 3 is a prequel that isn't as beholden to a strict and narrow continuity or many characters like so many other series, and yet Whannell (Wan's writing partner for the first two, Boner M's old buddy) plays things so safely and by the books with the scares (not even within this franchise, but the genre in general, even arguably nabbing a few scare set-ups from Wan's Conjuring), as well as ignoring the series' trademark The Further realm for so much of it -- eliminating the variety of faces and forms the hauntings come in -- that it's hard to understand why this was a story they felt was more interesting in chasing than simply going forward with what was teased at the end of Chapter 2. (Not that I remember its cliffhanger all that vividly, but I remember there being one.)

Where are the ghost kids dancing to Tiny Tim?! The afterlife-relative time-travel where a father is the culprit of his own haunting as a child?! Any grotesque. lumbering undead guys invisibly shrieking "HE'S GOT YOUR BABY. HE'S GOT YOUR BABY." over and over an inch away from people's faces?! Even some low-fi creepiness like the home security going off with an open door or the baby monitor voices like in the first one would've been welcome. Here's it's all: ominous noise, element being revealed that guarantees it's supernatural, linger.... linger...... then.. BAM(!) ghostly body part swoops into an (ostensibly) un-telegraphed part of the frame. When it works, it works. But after a while, you realize it's all they got. The big scares do have an odd punch to them, even when they are predictable, but I can't decide if the tingly feeling and the lump in my throat they often left me with had more to do with the sound design (and the theatre system that amped it all up) or what it actually delivered cinematically. The hilarious, prolonged screams from our audience helped make it all more eventful for sure.

The late-in-the-game plays for sentimentality also don't really work as well as they have to in order to justify the weight put on them to carry the finale, even with decent work by Shaye, Stefanie Scott, and satisfactory Derbel McDillet (who deserves better material). Shaye does fight the main demon woman from the first, throwing her against a wall and calling her a bitch while toughly taunting her after the scuffle. It's not great, but it's something that changes up the rhythm and elicited enough laugh from me that it has to be considered a highlight.

It simply feels like an unremarkable horror spec script that Whannell took on and fixed in the studio's eyes by wedging in Lin Shaye and his own character's duo from the first two, adding The Further, and slapping the Insidious name on it. Without those elements, there's no hook, no distinction, and even with them, there's not a lot of surprise.

** / 5.3