Review by Stephanie Scaife
I am not the intended audience for Insidious 2 so this makes it slightly difficult to write a fair review. I’m a film snob and I’ve seen so many horror movies that when a film such as this relies so heavily on the tried and tested conventions of the genre I’m simply overwhelmed with the sense of déjà vu. Not a jump scare goes by without me sighing and rolling my eyes. I’d seen James Wan’s Saw, The Conjuring and in preparation for this I also recently watched Insidious – I didn’t enjoy any of these films. These are horror movies for people who aren’t horror fans, where the cheap scares, convoluted plot and stock characters make for fun and scary viewing.
Insidious 2 has pretty much entirely the same set up as Insidious, with the family having relocated to except this time instead of Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai’s (Rose Byrne) son being trapped in the Further (the spirit world), it’s Josh who draws the short straw leaving his human body free to be possessed by a malign spirit. So Renai enlists the help of Carl (Steve Coulter), Specs (screenwriter Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) to figure out why Josh has now gone all Jack Torrance on them and to uncover his secret past.
Now, when I watched Insidious I’d found it to be fairly dull and predictable, and Insidious 2 is just more of the same; it’s repetitive and clearly a lazy cash in based on the success of the first film. Let’s hope that, like Saw, Insidious doesn’t turn into one of these franchises that drags on and on, churning one out each year around Halloween with an ever increasingly confusing mythology to match my decreasing interest/comprehension (delete as applicable). This isn’t to say that Insidious 2 is a bad film per se, but it’s entirely perfunctory which I think is oftentimes worse that something that is tangibly poor.
Patrick Wilson gives it his crazy-eyed best as Josh, but poor Rose Byrne is reduced to being nothing more than a squealing wreck. The comic relief of Carl and Tucker feels silly and misplaced with the only real saving grace being in the form of Barbara Hershey. Also, I hasten to add that many including our own Ben seemed to quite like this film, so I could just be getting bogged down in my own particular tastes and biases.
Although the official title contains the word “chapter” indicating that this is a continuation of the first film it actually acts as both a prequel, where we learn about Josh’s history with the supernatural and also as a direct sequel picking up in the aftermath of the first film. I can only assume that with any further chapters they will have to widen the field slightly as the focus on the serial aspects of the story has already seemingly removed any sort of originality and creativity, of which there was limited supply to begin with.
Ultimately though it’s pointless having a whinge about mainstream horror films and their successes because these films will still keep getting made and swathes of popcorn munching cinemagoers will continue to fork out the money to do so. You only have to look at the $5million budget and the $93million gross takings to see exactly why these kinds of films get made…
Insidious Chapter 2 is available now on Region 2 DVD and Blu-ray, from Entertainment One.