Review: Insidious Chapter 3

By Trent Crump
 ★★½

 - I saw this on a regular-sized theater screen in 2-D. 

I've thought for almost a full week how to talk about this movie.  Horror movies tend to be hard to review.  What scares one person won't scare another.  Jump scares are enjoyed by some, others hate them and find them to be cheating.  Some people will automatically give horror films low scores, others will give them all high scores based purely on how scary a movie is or how much it made them jump.  To do a review for a film, and to review it based on its merits outside of its genre...  That's hard to do with horror.   However, I will attempt it.

Despite being called Insidious Chapter 3, this film is actually a prequel to the first film in the series.  That means, if you want to go see the movie without having seen the first two, you're in luck.  (However, I wouldn't recommend it.)   This story is about an entirely different family than the other two films.  This girl, Quinn (Stefanie Scott), goes to visit the psychic Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) to try to communicate with her dead mother, whom she thinks is trying to get her attention.  However, Elise has given up contacting the dead, as her husband died and when she tried to contact him, something evil followed her back.  Whenever she tries to contact, it notices her and tries to kill her.  She tells Quinn to stop trying to contact her mother, because when she calls out to the dead, they all can hear her.  This is made evident by the figure she keeps seeing waving to her the next day.  And the knocking on her walls...  The figure by the curtains of her window...  As with most horror films, things get more and more creepier, more physical, more painful, until finally they realize something is terribly wrong and try to fix it.  

 As you can tell, it's not a very original horror film.  In fact, this is the same plot as the first two films in this series.  It's the plot of Poltergeist, both the new and the old one.  Haunting films run on a quite rigid formula, and I suppose if it's not broke, you can try to improve it, but will fail about 80% of the time, and with the low budgets these films normally have, it's easy to make money repeating yourself.  This one was made on $10 million and has already made over 4 times that amount, for example. (3/4 of that in the US.)  It's not even been out a week.  It's a PG-13 horror film that, while not really scary to this reviewer, does have some fantastic visuals and some of the best jump scares out there.  James Wan was the director of the first two films, but he was busy working on Furious 7 while this was filming.  The macabre humor he puts in his films is still here (he produced this, after all), but it's not there as much.  Nor is his fantastic use of odd bright color palettes or the sense of foreboding which he worked so well into The Conjuring two years ago.  It's more effective in its jump scares than other horror films of the type usually are.  It rarely pulls its punches into build-ups without the jump as modern horror is wont to do.

What hold this film together is Lin Shaye.  She was in the other two films and has a career as a character actress going back to the mid-1970s.  In her role here as Elise, she brings the same warmth and power she brought previously, but in this film she's a sad, doubting woman as well.  She's in mourning and can't do her job anymore.  Also back are the comic relief duo from the previous films.  The bloggers/ghosthunters who obviously are in over their heads without Elise.  (They haven't joined her yet in this one, obviously.)  Their slapstick and unprofessionalism are kind of humorous, but it's a bit overdone here and distracts from the spookiness of the film.

The movie as a whole is, in my opinion, about on the level of the second film.  It's got more heart than that one, but the girl being haunted here is an annoying teenage girl and her father is the typical Hollywood single father.  (Clueless, kind of mean, and can't run a household.)  The girl has a younger brother that has about 5 minutes of screen time and nothing to do in the whole movie.  I don't know why his character was included.  In fact, there are quite a few secondary characters in this that disappear for long periods of time and never show up again.  They were introduced, seemingly to have something to do with the plot, but it turns out they were just there to be introduced.  I'm thinking the editing here could have been much better.  Despite its numerous faults, it was worth the one viewing.  If you're a fan of the series, I'd suggest seeing it, if nothing else than to tide you over until the next installment, or at least until James Wan's Conjuring 2 comes out next summer.  Sometimes better than average is good enough.  Hey, it's better than the Poltergeist remake!