Problems of first two installments haunt ‘Insidious: Chapter 3’
THE WASHINGTON POST
The horror prequel “Insidious: Chapter 3” is a simple origin story, laying out, in somewhat ho-hum fashion, the details of how everyone’s second-favorite ghostbusters — steely spiritual medium Elise Rainier and her clownish sidekicks, known as Specs and Tucker — got together. Does anyone really care?
Leigh Whannell apparently thinks so. The writer of all three “Insidious” films — who also plays Specs — takes over the director’s chair from horror maestro James Wan (“The Conjuring”), moving Elise (Lin Shaye) and company a little bit more front and center.
That’s fine by me. Along with Shaye’s supernatural exterminator, the characters of Specs and Tucker (Angus Sampson) were the best things about chapters 1 and 2, proving popular enough to spawn their own series of tie-in webisodes. But the two characters, whose role as providers of comic relief is reminiscent of “The X-Files’ ” Lone Gunmen, are also somewhat polarizing. As Whannell explained to the fan site Dread Central in 2012, “There was this hatred that spewed out from fans saying, ‘I hated those guys! They sucked! They ruined the (first) movie!’ ”
For the record, Specs and Tucker are not what ruined the first — or, for that matter, the second — movie. That was both films’ over-the-top depiction of a fog-shrouded underworld populated by soulsucking zombies and ruled by a Mephistophelian demon made up like Darth Maul. But as much as I and some others like them, they are not enough to save “Chapter 3” from the same things that sunk the first two films.
Set a few years before the haunting depicted in the original film, the third installment centers on a teenage girl (Stefanie Scott) who has been targeted by a new stalker from the afterlife, a realm known in all three movies as “The Further.”