Bravo and goodbye Insidious
been there.
I’m actually surprised the ‘‘godmother of horror’’ hasn’t had her own festival yet. It’s surely only a matter of time.
Shaye is also pretty much the only reason you might want to see Insidious: The Last Key.
Sure, some of the scares are pretty well choreographed, a few of the creature designs are well executed and the technical credits – the sound design especially – are unassumingly superb.
It’s just that if you’ve already sat through every other film that writer Leigh Whannell ( Insidious, Insidious 2, the Saw franchise) has pointed his laptop at, then you already know how this is going to play out.
There’s the setup, in this case a flash-back to 1957 and an origin yarn of sorts for Shaye’s presentday paranormal investigator.
That’s then followed by a series of short sequences, with only a tenuous logical connection to any other scene in the film.
When the 100-minute mark is reached, the lights come up and you’re allowed to leave.
Insidious: The Last Key lifts the bar a little by at least trying to link its plot back to the events of the first film. The Rules of Attraction.
He’s moved on a little. There are some well worked moments here, but you would truly have to be a die-hard genre fan to pay good money to see Insidious: The Last Key.
And if you are that die-hard fan, then you have already seen far better and more frightening films than this in the past few years.
But, credit where it’s due. The Insidious series has at least posited an older woman as the hero of the franchise, which is as rare in horror as any other genre, and provided plenty of work and experience for a talented raft of designers, cinematographers and performers to add to their showreels and maybe knock a chunk off their mortgages.
And, not one of these films has ever left me feeling truly ripped off or insulted.
So bravo Insidious, and – hopefully – goodbye. – Graeme Tuckett