Culture

Peter Suderman Reviews Insidious: Chapter 2

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Film District

Insidious: Chapter 2 is the worst movie of the year:

It's not necessary to buy a ticket to "Insidious: Chapter 2." Anyone who wants to replicate the experience — although I can't imagine why anyone would — can instead tie a blindfold around their head and find a friend to shoot off a cap gun, or clang cymbals, or perhaps just poke them in face, at randomly timed intervals.

That exercise would provide the same sort of "thrills," or at least jolts, as the movie, which is less a film in the traditional sense than a low-budget clip reel of long, ominous pauses intermittently interrupted by a vast library of SCREECHES and THUMPS and assorted other LOUD NOISES. It's not scary so much as it is irritating and jarring.

There is a "plot" — something about a haunted family in which both father and son have the ability to enter a spooky netherworld — but the story, if you can call it that, has all the weight of an apparition. Exposition is handled through cryptic nonsense like, "I know what happened. I went into that dark place and got our son back. And something evil followed me." Well! That explains everything.

Read the whole review in The Washington Times