Insidious Review

Every time a horror film comes out, I feel the need to go and see it. I hadn't heard anything about this movie, but decided to spend the money on it. Was it worth it? Hmm, maybe not what I paid, but it's still worth going to see.

A couple moves into an old house with their two sons and baby daughter. The wife is stressed that her husband has to stay late at work, trying to write new songs, and left to handle her kids. It doesn't help that her daughter is constantly crying. When their oldest son, Dalton, falls off a ladder and ends up in a coma. The doctors can find no real medical reason why Dalton is in a coma and so he stays for three months. The wife begins to see a man in the house and something keeps opening the front door, triggering the alarm. Tired of all this, they move to a different house, but this solves nothing. It turns out that the hauntings are following them because their son has astral projected himself into The Further and they must bring his spirit back before his spirit fades away.

The movie is better than I was expecting from James Wan. Everyone will recognize him as being the director behind the first Saw movie. He also directed Deadly Silence which I found to be rather boring and tripe. When you see the title for Insidious, it looks like one of those old '60-'70 films, so I started thinking I was going to see something rather campy like those films. The movie isn't like that at all. And it isn't really another possession story as well, unlike the movie poster and trailers have implied.

Some of the spirits are genuinely terrifying, for awhile. The first one we are introduced to, this man in an overcoat, was at first quite disturbing. I jumped big time when we first see him. There is even this entity that was at first reminiscent of spirits you see given form in African and Native American paintings. A very primal fear of the otherworld. When we first see him, I didn't see it coming and it scared me. I was seriously hoping they wouldn't show him again, but when they do, it's in a jokey manner.

The movie takes on a humorous manner when we are introduced to these ghost hunters. Both of them are trying to compete with each other in their own fields, one is the engineer the other is the sketch artist, it's funny. But the rest of the film suffers after this and it stops being scary.

Overall, I have mixed feelings. The first half of the movie is truly a good way to start off a horror film, so it's sad to see it fall apart somewhat in the end. My recommendation is that if you do plan on seeing this, a rental or just waiting until it's a $5 movie or it's at the cheap theater. It's not bad, but the second half doesn't justify the price of a full price ticket.