"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Insidious Chapter 2

insidious2INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 2 is another pretty good ghost movie from director James Wan (DEATH SENTENCE, FURIOUS SEVEN) and his longtime co-writer Leigh Whannell. It’s actually a better sequel than usual because either they set up on purpose what part 2 would be or they just happened to leave a good hook for it on accident. Chapter 1 was kind of a POLTERGEIST meets JAWS THE REVENGE deal where this family thinks their house is haunted by a demonic Tiny-Tim-loving Darth Maul cosplayer, but it turns out their son (Ty Simpkins, IRON MAN THREE) is haunted. The dad (Patrick Wilson, THE A-TEAM), has to go to The Other Side or Tiptoe Through the Tulips Land or whatever to straighten things out with these fuckin ghosts. But also we met his mother (Barbara Hershey, BOXCAR BERTHA), and there was some indication that something like this had already happened to him before when he was a kid.

Well, now it all ties together. We flash back to his childhood (Isn’t chapter 2 kinda soon for that? I think this is gonna be a pretty short book. Will this even be a novella?) and then we see how it connects to some spookiness going on with the family right now, particularly with dad acting weird, being seen doing odd things when he thinks he’s alone, and covering his growing agitation with an increasingly awkward fake smile. Did he come back from ghost world somehow… wrong?

The first one dealt with the fear of spooky kids, this is one is all about the fear of insane dads and husbands. And the idea of someone you know really well suddenly seeming different, not themselves.

mp_insidious2
Why are the S and I red in the logo? Did they fuck up?

One thing I dug in chapter 1 was seeing Lin Shaye, a character actress known mostly for bit parts in New Line Cinema movies and as the nasty landlord in KINGPIN (“What is it about good sex that makes me have to crap? You really jarred something loose, Tiger!”), get to play the cool ghost expert. She returns, but the movie messes with us. First we just hear her voice dubbed over a younger actress playing her in the past. Then she’s a dead body, strangled to death in the family’s living room (dad swears he didn’t do it though). Alot of the movie deals with the wife (Rose Byrne, KNOWING) and her struggle between trusting her husband and the fact that he’s acting fucking weird.

Eventually they find a way to put Shaye back in the movie and she takes the time to hug everybody and say reassuring things, which shows why the character is so lovable (though it’s another thing similar to POLTERGEIST – the ghost expert lady hugs the protagonist in that too).

I’m not big on the ghost movies, and at first this seems like just a bunch more cliche ghosty shit. You got lots of noisy baby toys that suddenly turn on and make everybody shit their pants. Oh my god it’s a ghost oh no it’s just an electronic toy it’s a false alarm everybody… or is it? You got creepy sounds on the baby monitor. You got brief images of a creepy old lady with pancake makeup. You got a little girl with pigtails and a pretty old fashioned dress and a dollhouse with her back turned whispering ominous warnings. All that shit.

But I was happy that as it revealed what was going on, as convoluted as it is, it fits together. It has a logic to it. One problem I have with ghost movies is that they can just be an excuse to string together unexplained creepy shit. That almost always runs out of steam by the end because you start to notice the pattern and the lack of consequences to anything that happens.

This is the rare ghost movie that gains the steam at the end. Some of those cliches I mentioned get twisted around and you find out it’s actually something different than it looked like. And it does something I haven’t seen before in a ghost movie involving a (SPOILER I BELIEVE) time loop. Instead of random weird ghost shit you realize it’s all pretty carefully planned, the later scenes explain and connect to the earlier scenes, we find out who these ghosts are, plus how they tie in to the dad and the childhood incident referenced in the first movie, plus the mystery of what’s wrong with him now, and they figure out how to deal with it. There is some elbow grease put into this movie at least. Not bad in my opinion.

“INSIDIOUS CHAPTER 2 is fastidious about what it’s trying to do!” –Vern


This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2015 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Horror, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

9 Responses to “Insidious Chapter 2”

  1. Did you ever catch OCULUS, Vern? I certainly don’t recommend it as a great movie; however, I think it’s a flawed but interesting film you could write a great review of.

  2. A couple of nights ago I saw SINISTER 2 in the cinema. Not a big fan of it. I liked the first one though.

  3. Only recently watched insidious 2. Not as good as the original but I did like some elements of it. Like Vern mentioned with the time loop, this was a bit unexpected. Felt as if it was the Back to the Future 2 of horror movies, with them revisiting scenes from the original movie.

    Unfortunately I watched Insidious 3 the night after, which comes across as a quick cash grab and an excuse to shoe horn Lin Shaye back into the franchise.

  4. SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILERS

    >”And it does something I haven’t seen before in a ghost movie involving a (SPOILER I BELIEVE) time loop”

    Unfortunately I feel this this particular gimmick is actually becoming increasingly ubiquitous in supernatural movies. ABANDONED, HOUSE AT THE END OF TIME, THE REEDS, TRIANGLE, HAUNTER, OCULUS.. –and those are just one ones I can think of off the top of my head– all have similarly vague time travel gimmicks. They’re all pretty decent movies (in fact, mostly better than INSIDIOUS in my book) but I’m getting pretty sick of this conceit as a way for horror writers to try for a twist.

  5. Crushinator Jones

    October 2nd, 2015 at 1:56 pm

    Triangle isn’t a good example. It’s built around the time loop, it’s not tacked on, it’s exposed relatively early and not as a shocking twist.

  6. The Original Paul

    October 2nd, 2015 at 2:37 pm

    I second the recommendation for OCULUS. I know one or two people have commented on this site that they really hated it; I thought it was very good, although it had a couple of major structural issues that prevented it from being great.

  7. I like OCULUS a lot too, but I like director Mike Flanagan’s previous movie, the kickstarter-funded ABSENTIA, even better.

    Crushinator — fair point, it’s not used as a twist in that movie, but the gimmick is the same.

  8. If you both spoke Spanish and had a reverse-colorblindness eye condition that allowed you to see red but not white, you would believe the poster of this was advertising a movie entitled YES 2. And the opening date. I hope that clears up something.

  9. *SPOILERS* Maybe it’s the fact that I saw this a few years too late and the most famous sequence was already spoiled multiple times for me, but man, this movie was kind of a chore to sit through. Just slow and tedious, with the “scary” setpieces not delivering enough to cover up for the wheel-spinning, unfocused plot. Wilson is stuck in a poor man’s The Shining, Hershey is stuck in a subpar episode of Ghost Hunters, and I don’t know about Byrne because she’s barely in this one until the end. I could have sworn this came out before The Conjuring because it still feels like Wan is learning the ropes in how to pace and structure a scene; now that I know it came out AFTER, I can only guess he was bored and burnt out on ghost movies, and had to finish this contractual obligation even though he’s found a franchise he’s more interested in. (See: JJ and Star Trek Into Darkness)

    The “plot holes” are even more gaping and laughable than last time (why are there still files in the basement of a condemned hospital? Why is the killer’s house still full of clues and furniture and toys like 30 years after his death?), the two comic-relief assistants are more annoying, and I still don’t understand why there’s 3 kids when only one ever comes into play. I also don’t understand what happened to the lipstick demon from last time, and why he was replaced with a lazy Norman Bates clone. Also, I think I’ve complained about Wan’s ghost antagonists never having a satisfying or even coherent comeuppance in any of the movies – well, she certainly gets one here even though “making a ghost somehow disappear by bashing his mom’s head in with a rocking horse” isn’t a solution I’d ever see coming.

    As for the famous time-travel sequence – it’s kinda fun and clever (i really like Elise’s tongue in cheek “So THAT was what that was all about!”), but let’s be honest – the trip back to the first movie has nothing to do with anything, it doesn’t feel satisfying or planned, and Wilson could have been inserted into about 20 different scenes from the first film and it wouldn’t have made a difference, it’s just a cute easter egg that doesn’t really make or break the movie and unfortunately doesn’t save it from being a slog. I kinda want to watch Insidious 3 now though – the idea of this franchise now being headlined by Shaye is kinda hilarious.

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