[yasr_overall_rating]
Parapsychologist Dr. Elise Rainier faces her most fearsome and personal haunting yet – in her own family home.
In the Academy Award-winning film for Best Picture “Argo,” Ben Affleck is having a conversation with John Goodman, who plays a special effects makeup artist working on a movie project. Goodman says that the special effects won’t appeal to the producer’s target audience. Of course, Affleck asks who that audience is. Goodman responds, “People with eyes.” I won’t go so far as to say that “Insidious: The Last Key” missed its target by quite that much, but whatever that audience is, it didn’t include me.
Watching the film was a decidedly uncomfortable, if not altogether irritating experience. The litany of contemptable jolts of both sight and sound, invariably prefaced by two, or three or four false alarms got old in a hurry. Apparently, the mere flash of something creepy or disturbing across the screen was not adequately scary for test audiences. After a while, it became clear that the next graphic split-second image would be shamelessly accompanied by a crescendo of shrill soundtrack music – neither of which was ever very far off. The best that director Adam Robitel could do was try to make it difficult to predict the exact timing.
Yet despite all that, there are significant sections of the film that move at a snail’s pace, as if attempting to lull the viewers back into a comfortable complacency before the next tawdry “surprise.” While interspersed with humor throughout – and a welcome respite when it does finally come – the laughs are not enough to offset the mindless and crude jabs the filmmakers inflict so consistently and gleefully.
The best that can be said about the film is that the earthbound characters were often charming and funny. In particular, the writer Leigh Whannell along with Angus Sampson, Caitlin Gerard and Spencer Locke almost make the ride worthwhile.
Unfortunately, shrouded in a weak narrative that proves to be less than engaging, the film never takes off. When the denouement finally comes, it is underwhelming and unsatisfying. Had the script contained some intricacy of plotting or story, there might have been hope.
Yet, fear not horror film lovers: The “Insidious” films (the original, “Chapter 2,” “Chapter 3”) have been box office smashes on very inexpensive budgets – there’s no reason to assume that “The Last Key” will be any different. So the ongoing onslaught shock-horror films should continue in earnest.
Jodie Foster recently said that the spate of superhero flicks has made going to the movies like a theme park experience. The same might be said for the plethora of scary movies that don’t add up to much more than a lucrative opportunity to provoke some cheap reactions from the audience.
In theaters Friday, January 5th
