Saturday, June 6, 2015

Movie Review #268: "Insidious: Chapter 3" (2015)

Movie"Insidious: Chapter 3"
Ticket Price: $12.50
Director: Leigh Whannell
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 37 minutes
Image Source
A young girl named Quinn (Stefanie Scott) attempts to make contact with her dead mother, but inadvertently contacts something else. Now, this entity wants to drag Quinn's soul into The Further with him. Quinn's father Sean (Dermot Mulroney) pleads for help from Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), who is reluctant since she has left the spiritualist business as she is tormented by a demon of her own. 

The lesson of the day is: don't judge a movie by its mediocre set of movies?

We were pretty surprised by "Insidious: Chapter 3," mainly because we were expecting much worse than what we got. When we saw the trailer, it looked like this "Insidious" prequel had been boiled down to nothing but jump scares. Since this is all the trailer showed, and in typical new age horror movie fashion, we have come to expect the bulk of a movie to contain an endless amount of these rather pointless, familiar scares. Now that we have seen the film, it remarkably has a lot more to offer than just startling its audience with ultra loud noises. Sure, it has its fair share of these jump scare moments, maybe even a few too many for our tastes, but there is also a ton of good imagery that is quite scary, as well as a lot of haunting and creeps. Things like shadowy figures off in the distance waiving at Quinn, the seemingly crazy old woman who lives at Quinn's apartment complex, and the main entity in this film, known as The Man Who Can't Breath, played by Michael Reid MacKay, are all very unsettling to say the least. Of course, once in The Further, we see a lot of the ghosts that live there and these spirit souls add some good ambiance to an already creepy film. These ghosts also have a purpose as they are souls collected by The Man Who Can't Breath, which leads to a eerie moment as we see Quinn's partially collected soul crawling across the floor with, how should we put this delicately, less than her person attached to her?? There are other moments that can and probably will send a shiver up your spine and perhaps even some vomit up your throat if you've ever broken a limb in real life. You see, our protagonist Quinn has broken her legs, and when her body is inhabited by the entity, well, this may be the most unnerving scene in the entire film if you hate the sound of walking of broken, crunchy limbs. YUCK.

Stefanie Scott is good as Quinn Brenner, though her character's main purpose is to be abused by this entity and to be a constant damsel in distress. This does get a bit tiring after a while, but she's fine in this movie. Dermot Mulroney plays her father, Sean, and though we have liked him in other movies, he didn't seem to be putting his full effort into this part. He came off as more than a little wooden, as if he were reading his lines straight from the page, and we definitely noticed this. Horror is probably not his genre. Some of his acting might be for his character, an out of touch father who doesn't know what blogging is and is forced to take care of his kids after his wife dies, and if so, he nails this, but it's still all very stiff in its execution. This being a prequel, Lin Shaye was able to reprise her role as Elise Rainier and puts on a solid performance. She definitely showcases the best acting in this film. She has this unique way about her that makes her easy to watch, even when she's screaming or being choked by an entity. The movie shows how she met Specs, played again by Leigh Whannell, who also took over the directing duties in this installment, and Tucker, played by Angus Sampson, who both provide some much needed comic relief as they did in "Insidious" and "Insidious: Chapter 2." We didn't really like the first "Insidious" film when we saw it, but after seeing the prequel, it makes us want to revisit the others and see if our perspective has changed on the earlier installments. All in all, we were impressed with how much "Insidious: Chapter 3," which should really be called "Insidious" Chapter -1," didn't suck, but the franchise as a whole probably doesn't need to continue now.

My Rating: 6.5/10
BigJ's Rating: 6.5/10
IMDB's Rating: ~7.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: ~59%
Do we recommend this movie: Sure, why not?

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