[Film Review] Insidious Chapter 2

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I'll be upfront with you, I genuinely had no idea how James Wan intended to continue his 2011 film, Insidious. With the seeming possession of the main protagonist, Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson), the death of the psychic hired to help his son, and the house in confusion following an astral travelling jaunt into the Further (a spiritual realm, akin to Limbo, that exists alongside our physical reality), I really didn't see how he could make a sequel. Reviews have certainly been mixed and the reception mostly lukewarm, but for my own part, I rather enjoyed it.

In the first film, Josh's son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) went astral travelling (apparently such a talent runs in families) but strayed too far from his body. Imprisoned by a demon that looked more like Darth Maul, Dalton couldn't get back in order to wake up, and he spent most of the film in a medically inexplicable coma. Hence the decision by Josh and wife Renai (Rose Byrne) to turn to Elise (Lin Shaye), a psychic who thought she could help by sending Josh (also capable of astral travel) into the Further after Dalton. Trouble is, Josh was haunted by a mysterious old woman, intent on possessing Josh's body, and it isn't Josh that comes back.

Fast forward to Chapter 2 and the Lamberts are now staying with Josh's mother, Lorraine (Barbara Hershey). Strange happenings are still going on, like the piano playing by itself in an empty room, or baby Kali's babywalker switching itself on. Lorraine begins to see a mysterious woman in white wandering through the house, a woman who physically attacks Renai when she's home alone. Indeed, these scenes of ghostliness are some of the best in the film, using taut suspense to unsettle the home. All is not at all well.

Specs (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson), the amusing ghost hunting nerds from the first film, are devastated at Elise's death, but accidentally discover footage shot in 1986 of Elise's first meeting with a teenaged Josh, during which he was made to forget his astral travel abilities to keep the old woman at bay. Along with Carl (Steve Coulter), a psychic present at the 1986 meeting, Specs, Tucker and Lorraine begin contacting Elise, and investigating exactly who this shadowy figure is.

The film is not without its flaws. There is a lot of explaining - no character can do or say anything without feeling the need to expound at length about the why and the what of almost everything. Wan, believe me, the audience gets it. The motivation of the old woman is to regain childhood...so why target Josh when he's an adult? Josh's gift is originally described as unique but given Dalton's ability, that's clearly not the case. Surely it stands to reason that others can do the same thing, and the old woman would be better off looking for someone else to persecute. There's also a time travel paradox, since apparently time does not function in the Further, meaning the present day Josh, trapped in the Further, can now influence the hauntings from the first film, and also the seance in 1986. Of course, time travel paradoxes only exist if you accept the premise that time is linear, and given the spectral construction of the Further it's entirely possible that time would not behave in a linear fashion, but I don't want to get into existential discussions here. The motivation of the woman in white is also unsatisfactory, and I felt the final denouement was just too 'neat', as if Wan realised he needed to keep running time down and simply tacked on an ending.

That said, there's much to admire. The set design of the Lambert house is far creepier than either of the houses in the first film, being more of a Victorian homage to claustrophobia. The character of Dalton is a revelation, given far more to do than in the first film, and he proves to be a resourceful, brave and intelligent character. Renai even surprises with sudden bursts of courage, despite her propensity to run around screaming, and Specs and Tucker balance the suspense with their 'bromance' bickering. Patrick Wilson is truly astonishing in his dual role as Possessed Josh and Trapped in the Further Josh. Possessed Josh is creepy and genuinely unsettling, and I hadn't thought Wilson capable of such dexterity. While I'd like to sit James Wan down and have a solid discussion about use of narrative in a Gothic horror film, I do think there is a lot to admire in his direction, and Insidious 2 veers closer to his recent success, The Conjuring, than the original film.

I wouldn't recommend Insidious 2 for anyone who hasn't seen the original film, but those who enjoyed the first film, and the eerie world it created, then I'd highly recommend Chapter 2.

Four blunt pencils!

[Film Review] The Conjuring

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Nearly every horror film that is released nowadays bills itself as "the scariest movie", either of all time, or that particular year. It's hardly surprising - after all, horror is one of the few genres that is focused on how they make the audience feel, as opposed to being clustered according to theme or iconography. The problem occurs because how scary a film is can be a difficult thing to judge - what terrifies me does not necessarily terrify you, and even if we're terrified by the same thing, there's no guarantee that we'll find it frightening when we see it on screen.

That being said, I do think The Conjuring can lay some sort of claim toward being one of the creepiest films of recent years. Director James Wan might be responsible for Saw, and thus the tedious succession of torture-porn-lite sequels, but having begun to explore the supernatural side of horror with Insidious in 2010, he now has a go at a period piece horror. The Conjuring is set in the 1970s, and based upon a true story surrounding Ed and Lorraine Warren, prominent ghost hunters and demonologists who also investigated the Amityville case. Patrick Wilson plays Ed, while Vera Farmiga plays Lorraine. Despite their scientific and methodical approach, the couple's brand of ghost busting relies heavily on their Catholic backgrounds, as well as upon Lorraine's clairvoyancy. This is not a film that wants to leave any ambiguity as to whether these things are real - as far as The Conjuring goes, this might as well be a documentary. 

The Perron family buy a house in Rhode Island at auction, and promptly move in, excited by their spacious new home. This being a horror film, settling in is not destined to be easy, and after discovering a boarded-up basement, things start going wrong in the house. Carolyn, played by Lili Taylor, finds herself covered in mysterious bruises, while the five daughters are either pulled out of bed by an invisible force or speak to people that no one else can see. Carolyn realises something is afoot, and contacts the Warrens for their help. The couple investigate, and must tell the family the grim truth, that their house isn't haunted by a ghost, but rather an inhuman spirit. In order to qualify for an exorcism, evidence must be gathered, and the family must wait it out while the spirits do enough damage to persuade the authorities that this isn't just a pesky poltergeist. 

Just as Paranormal Activity purported to be about ghosts but instead went with the demonic, so The Conjuring eschews ghostly goings on in favour of diabolical intervention. It essentially takes the worst parts of Poltergeist and combines them with The Exorcist, all while reminding you that this actually happened. It would be incredibly easy to dismiss it as cinematic fluff, but in all honesty, I found some of the scenes quite harrowing, not necessarily because of the phenomena depicted, but because I actually cared about the characters. I've done paranormal investigations myself and I've never been thrown across a room or seen mysterious figures in mirrors, but that doesn't mean I can't feel for a mother who's been locked in her own basement by someone she can't even see. I'm also uncomfortable with the insistence that all of this activity is the result of demons - naturally a belief in demons requires a belief in God - but I'll go with it for the sake of the film.

A lot of the reviews of the film keep picking flaws based on how 'true' the film is, but I think that's to miss the point. Even if the entire thing is made up, it doesn't follow that it'll be a bad film. Mary Shelley dreamed Frankenstein and it hasn't stopped the story from being a success, has it? James Wan has proven he can direct a film with little/no gore, and very few special effects, although the insertion of the Warrens' famous Annabelle case just seemed like an excuse to shoehorn yet another weird doll into one of his films. The performances all round help to make The Conjuring feel like a real family drama, as opposed to the usual melodrama that accompanies modern hauntings. It's not scary in the slightest, but it's downright creepy - and in my book, that's harder to manage.

5 blunt pencils out of 5

[Film Review] The World's End

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It's hard to believe that it's some nine years since the first of the so-called 'Cornetto trilogy' was released, with Shaun of the Dead providing a British take on the zombie genre. Some three years later, in 2007, Hot Fuzz did the honours with its combination of action movie heroism and Midsomer Murders 'weird village'. The World's End is a peculiar hybrid of the two, with a helping of Invasion of the Body Snatchers for good measure.

Simon Pegg plays Gary King, a somewhat unlikeable guy who's never matured from the seventeen year old who once attempted the so-called Golden Mile, a pub crawl that takes in twelve pubs as it wends its way through the small town of Newton Haven. His four friends have all grown up and gotten proper jobs, and started families, but Gary still lives for the night that they never finished the Mile. Apparently the idea came from a pub crawl director Edgar Wright once started but never finished, and he liked the idea of a quest that was never completed. Gary certainly treats it as such, as though to conquer the Golden Mile would allow him to, in a way, conquer the version of himself that has never allowed him to move on with his life. In an attempt to get closure, he manipulates Andy (Nick Frost), Oliver (Martin Freeman), Peter (Eddie Marsan) and Steven (Paddy Considine) into accompanying him on one last hurrah.

One of the things they've said about the film in interviews is that "you can never go back" (which I think isn't true as I returned to Newcastle after seven years in London and fitted back in), and the point here is that the friends find it difficult to enjoy the pub crawl as they think they've changed too much since leaving the town. After a brutal fight in a pub toilet, they soon discover that it's not them who has changed - it's the town. The inhabitants have been replaced by what they believe are robots, which leads to several debates in which they attempt to come up with a name for said 'bots' ("Smashy smashy egg man" is a particular classic). Can they get out of town before they're replaced themselves? More importantly, can Gary finally finish the Golden Mile?

I can honestly say that I half-detested Gary for the first third of the film or so - but I think in some ways that's the point. It's never made entirely clear why the others liked him even as a teenager, as he behaves like an absolute spanner, but then never having been a teenage boy I don't know how these things work. In many ways, he's the Peter Pan of the story, leading his Lost Boys on another adventure. Even when the friends discover they're surrounded by robots, and they're repeatedly attacked by them, Gary's determination to finish the pub crawl is, in a bizarre way, almost commendable. Of course, the film's denouement allows some explanation for his behaviour, and Pegg pulls it off in the way he always manages to do.

However, the real revelation of the film is Nick Frost, playing Gary's best friend at school, Andy. There has been a lot of bad blood between Andy and Gary, and Andy is determined to remain teetotal on the pub crawl. Being attacked by robots is enough to send anyone over the edge, and there is something of a Hulk-like transformation when Andy goes back to the drink, and watching him batter his way through oncoming hordes is nothing sort of visual ballet. The makers came up with a new form of combat nicknamed 'pub fu', an amalgamation of kung fu and bar room brawl, and it feels very much like you're watching men who learned to fight watching wrestling and movies as children. It's brilliant!

As with the previous two films, there are plenty of appearances by the actors from both the earlier films and various other Channel 4 comedies, as well as two higher ranking stars in the form of Rosamund Pike, who plays Oliver's sister Sam, and Pierce Brosnan, who plays a former schoolteacher. It's nice to watch Pike giving as good as she gets, but I couldn't help wondering at the absence of Jessica Hynes. It feels a little slow to get into second gear, but the film becomes much funnier once they realise that all is not as it seems in Newton Haven. It's entertaining, and I think the 'moral' of the film can be summed up in the sense that nobody's perfect, but if you just try the best you can, you'll get there in the end. Maybe we could all learn from that.

4 out of 5

[Review] World War Z

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I’ll be honest, since I first started seeing trailers for World War Z, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to see it – mainly because I really enjoyed the book and could see it was going to be nothing like it. In many ways, I think the biggest problem that the film faces is comparisons to the book, but having now seen it, I can say it seems like World War Z was inspired by the book, but is not an adaptation of it. In all honesty, there are more nods and references to The Zombie Survival Guide – if they’d thrown in some Zombieland style rules, they could have almost changed the title and gotten away with it. Of course the internet is aflame with condemnation but I don’t know how many of the people slagging it off have actually seen it.

Well I have, and I’m actually both surprised and relieved to say I really enjoyed it. I think popular culture has been groaning under the weight of the zombie-related bandwagon jumpers of late, and I think it was always going to be difficult to add yet another zombie film to the pile – particularly one starring Brad Pitt. Well I think Pitt has a broader range than he’s normally given credit for, and here he plays a former UN investigator, Gerry, who’s sent off to find the elusive Patient Zero in the hopes of creating a vaccine against the zombie virus.

It’s not easy for him. When we first meet Gerry, he’s trying to get his family out of Philadelphia (well, Glasgow masquerading as Philadelphia) and later he’s stuck in a Newark apartment building with zombies snapping at his heels. He’s sent off to South Korea, and then Israel, before ending up in Wales. Bit of a globe-trotter, our Gerry. But what I like about him as a protagonist is that a) he’s not stupid, and he even goes so far as to duct tape thick glossy magazines to his limbs as impromptu body armour and b) he notices things. You’d hope that an investigator would do that, but Gerry not only notices salient details among the carnage, he actually comes up with theories that are completely plausible. He doesn’t need to be told things, he works it out for himself – in essence, he becomes a proxy for the audience who are by now so well versed in zombie lore that they don’t need things to be spelled out.

For a zombie film, World War Z is surprisingly bloodless. If you want lingering close-ups of bloodied mouths and corpses being ripped apart then you’re better off with Zac Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake. Instead, World War Z derives its horror from the sheer spectacle of that many zombies in one place. They don’t run so much as they swarm, turning the traditional faceless mass into a wave that sweeps through any space. Imagine a plague of locusts stripping a space bare and you’ll get the idea. Despite the lesser amount of gore, it’s still a visceral film, and even contains moments of actual suspense. It also has a clever use of sound, riffing on the sections in The Zombie Survival Guide that counsel weapons like crowbars over guns as noise will simply attract more zombies. The quiet sections just serve to highlight how loud our world normally is.

I know there will still be a lot of people online bleating that “it’s nothing like the book”, and I’ve even seen a comparison to 28 Weeks Later (which is ridiculous as 28 Weeks Later was appalling) but all I can say is if you’ve read the book, try to go into it without expecting it to be the same. If it makes it easier, consider it as a film that just has the same name as the book – and try to spot the Zombie Survival Guide references instead!

4.5 out of 5!