Movie Review: "Insidious: Chapter 2" (2013)

Movie: "Insidious: Chapter 2"
Director: James Wan
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 46 minutes

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Picking up where the original left off, Renai (Rose Byrne) is being questioned about the death of spiritual medium Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye). The police are waiting for forensic evidence to see if her husband, Josh (Patrick Wilson), was involved in the murder. Ever since travelling into The Further, Josh has been acting strangely. Though the strange ghostly phenomena are still happening, Josh insists everything is fine and that the ghosts are gone, which will allow them to resume their normal live. Lorraine Lambert (Barbara Hershey), Josh's mother, is also seeing the ghosts and tries to investigate to why they are still occuring. She enlists the help of Carl (Steve Coulter), who along with Elise, helped Josh in the past. Along with Carl, Specs (Leigh Whannell), and Tucker (Angus Sampson), they unravel the mystery of the haunting of Josh and Dalton.

This is a decent sequel, but we weren't huge fans of the original, so it is what it is. There were a few points during the film where I actually screamed out loud (and didn't feel bad about it because we were alone in theater 11 which smells like egg farts).

The makeup work in the original was better than in this film, and the original ghosts were more interesting and of a greater variety than its sequel. "Insidious: Chapter 2" has a much more pinpoint focus on a smaller number of ghosts and unravels the story of those ghosts over time. "Insidious: Chapter 2" took many plot points of this film and interwove it back with "Insidious;" this was a cool and interesting way of storytelling that James Wan also used in the "Saw" series, which he produced. This movie takes Specs and Tucker on a different path, adding a slapstick type of comic relief; these two characters will probably be sticking around for "Insidious: Chapter 3," since the film was left open ended.

When James Wan makes his movies, they are typically not expensive to make. His return on investment is insane: "Insidious: Chapter 2" cost $5 million to make, and has netted almost $75 million thus far. Who wouldn't want to keep milking such a money-making franchise?

My Rating: 6/10
BigJ's Rating: 5.5/10
IMDB's Rating: 7.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 35%
Do we recommend this movie: Sure, why not?