Lock the door and throw away ‘Last Key’
Films don’t come much lazier or by the numbers than “Insidious: The Last Key,” the fourth and, judging by that title, the last (or maybe not as it turns out) installment in the series that began in 2010 with the surprise box-office hit “Insidious.”
That film featured a “Poltergeist”-ready family tormented by demons, whose members are aided by the psychic Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye, who has emerged as a major screen presence in these films) and her ghostbusting “sidekicks” Specs (Leigh Whannell, who wrote the original film as well as this installment) and Tucker (Angus Sampson).
In this fourth film’s opening, a family lives in a house next door to a prison in 1953 New Mexico, where the lights dim when a man is electrocuted and the father is a prison guard and TV-addicted sadist. He tries to beat the psychic powers out of his daughter, the young Elise (Ava Kolker), who shares a bedroom with her little brother, Christian (Pierce Pope). As it turns out, these scenes, which suggest a parody of a parody of several Stephen King stories, are the film’s scariest, and they feature a little boy ghost and a whistle the children’s mother (Tessa Ferrer) gives them to call her in times of need.
But like all the scares in “Insidious: The Last Key,” the spooky beats in this film are things jumping in front of the camera, the oldest trick in the filmmaker’s book and the equivalent of shouting “Boo!” in your face.
Before you know it, it’s 2010, and an obviously crazy guy named Ted Garza (Kirk Acevedo) calls Elise (Shaye), who lives in Los Angeles, and tells her he needs her help. Where does he live? Elise’s childhood home in New Mexico. Fire up the “Winnebay-ghost,” Specs and Tucker.
You’ve heard the horror film axiom “Don’t go in the basement”? Well, you can’t keep the characters in “Insidious: The Last Key” out of the blasted basement. I lost count of the number of times someone wandered down there to be met by the ghost of a dark-haired woman in a dingy slip.
It turns out Ted has piled stacks of Bibles in front of the door to Elise’s childhood bedroom. Much of the time, Specs remains in the team’s RV watching what is going on through a camera rigged on Elise. She starts talking again about going “into the further,” which is, I believe, to the right of the “sunken place” and just above “the upside down,” and, for sure, “through the looking glass.”
Don’t expect much sense from this screenplay. How crazy is Ted to call investigators to his house? You’ll find out if you mistakenly pay to see this. Sampson manages to wring a few laughs out of the script’s wan attempts at humor.
Throughout all of this bludgeoning foolishness and unoriginality (Bruce Davison looks sufficiently aghast to be in this), Shaye somehow maintains her dignity, exuding poise, good will and courage in the face of whatever horrors director Adam Robitel (“The Taking of Deborah Logan”) throws at her. This will include a character named KeyFace, who can insert a key into characters’ throats and shut off their screams. Apparently, that is what happened to the audience, too, since all I heard during the film’s running time were occasional derisive titters.
(“Insidious: The Last Key” contains gruesome imagery and violence, so of course it is PG-13.)