‘ Annabelle Comes Home’ is good, dumb - and scary - summer fun

ARTISTICALLY, it’s hard to sustain, let alone build on, a popular horror franchise. The cinematic ‘Conjuring’ universe - an interconnected series of hit horror fifi lms that began with 2013’s ‘The Conjuring’ - has been a critically mixed bag. (All the fifilms have made money, but April’s ‘The Curse of La Llorona’ had the worst opening weekend of the series.)

‘The Conjuring 2’? Kind of meh. And that devil-doll spinoff ‘Annabelle’ - an utter stinker, only to be followed by what turned out to be a scary-good prequel: ‘ Annabelle: Creation.’ ‘The Nun’ just felt like pandering: not terrible, but certainly not necessary.

Now there’s ‘Annabelle Comes Home’, the seventh ‘Conjuring’ installment and the third in the standalone trilogy of films about a malevolent doll. If it’s not quite as good as the doll’s origin story, ‘Creation’, it’s still way more fun than any sequel - especially one this deep into a franchise - has any right to be.

Returning to the series’ roots, the new movie opens on Ed and Lorraine Warren, characters based on real-life husband-and-consultants of demonology and witchcraft. Played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, Ed and Lorraine refamiliarise us with the title character - if that’s the right word for an ostensibly inanimate plaything that seems to possess the ability to pop up in places you didn’t put her - in a short prologue that harks back to the opening scene of ‘ The Conjuring’.

They remove the doll Annabelle from a home she had been terrorizing and relocate her to their ‘artifact room’: a deadbolted repository in their basement where they store objects that are haunted, cursed or just plain evil. Into a vitrine she goes - behind consecrated glass reclaimed from a demolished chapel - a er a splash or two of holy water and some mumbled prayers by a Catholic priest.