Last year, director James Wan gave us
the film “The Conjuring.” The film told of a married couple of
paranormal investigators, helping a family who lived in a haunted
house, and banish the ghosts. After viewing it a couple times, I
found the film to be very effective, as well as one of the best
original horror films in a long time. James Wan is a great horror
film director, and I do hope his entry into the “Fast and the
Furious” franchise turns out well. With how popular “The
Conjuring” was, surely there would be a franchise they could milk
from this. With the room of antique items that the Warrens had in the
film, the producers decided to give some of those items, namely the
doll at the beginning, a film that explains their power.
“Annabelle” tells of a young
expecting couple, who are suddenly attacked by cultists. When one of
them, Annabelle, dies and drips blood into the doll, it soon sets off
a demonic connection with the couple through said doll. And the rest,
you can guess from here.
Not only does this film fail as a
successor to “The Conjuring,” it fails as a horror film in
general. My main complaint about this film, is that it's BORING.
Hardly anything in this film was scary, and whenever it tried to be,
it's either a stupid jump scare or close ups of the doll. Which, by
the way, the more you see the doll, the more laughable it is than
scary...that seems to also describe the movie. There were only two
scenes out of the entire film that actually did scare me: one was the
scene where Alfre Woodward gets pounced at in the third act, and the
other was the stairway chase. Other than that, nothing else was
scary, not even the look of the demon that's haunting them, which
looks like the gray-cooked version of the “Insidious” demon.
While the acting wasn't terrible, it
wasn't good either. The main couple played by Ward Horton and
Annabelle Wallis always shifted between being somewhat tolerable to
just plain bad. The only other two characters worth mentioning are
the priest and Alfre Woodward as the religious expert, which are both
about as dull as you'd expect.
While James Wan did produce the film,
the director of this film was John R. Leonetti, the cinematographer
for “The Conjuring,” as well as other films like “The Mask,”
“Mortal Kombat,” “Insidious,” and “Piranha 3D.” However,
much like Wally Pfister and “Transcendence,” Leonetti is not as
skilled with direction, with the evidence being this film AND “Mortal
Kombat: Annihilation.” Yeah, wrap your head around that one.
Overall, “Annabelle” was just
disappointment. A big heaping pile of disappointment. While it isn't
as bad as something like “Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones,”
a film we'll get to later on this month, it still doesn't make up for
some of the bullshit found in the rest of this.
Rating: 3/10
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