insidious chapter 2

For my money, 2010’s Insidious was the scariest movie of the 2000s. And surprisingly enough, it came from the creators of Saw, one of the most plodding and tortuous (no pun intended) horror film franchises ever. If anything, that proves writer Leigh Whannell and director James Wan know how to stay ahead of a trend. And with horror moving in a more suggestive direction, the creative duo struck a nerve with little more than creaking doors, spooky voices and a whole lot of Poltergeist references.

Insidious: Chapter 2 reunites the entire team behind and in front of the cameras, with Rose Byrne returning as the beleaguered wife of Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) who returned from the netherworld to retrieve their astral projecting son from a flame-faced demon. But unfortunately, it wasn’t actually Josh who came back. Possessed by the twisted spirit of a mass murderer, his body’s new occupant has the most evil intentions towards the rest of the family, which prompts matriarch Lorraine Lambert (Barbara Hershey) to dig even deeper into her son’s past.

Whannell’s script admirably tries to build off of the events from the first film, layering in more back-story and sending each character off on their own separate supernatural missions. But it’s that complexity that is the film’s undoing. The original’s straightforward narrative is replaced by a more desperate search through various family trees with branches that break more often than they bend.

None of which would matter of course if the film hit a few scares out of the park. But other than the creepy use of a homemade soup-can telephone, Insidious: Chapter 2 is disappointingly bland. Patrick Wilson makes the most of his character’s flip to the dark side (he and new cast addition Steve Coulter share the film’s best scene), but everyone else is just relegated to wide-eyed terror. Which most of the time is, sorry to say, completely unjustified.

Sony’s blu-ray / DVD / ultraviolet combo gives viewers a number of exclusive extras that the standard DVD leaves off, including webisodes, on set Q & A, a location tour of the hospital scene and Whannell’s Insidious journal.