Insidious: Chapter 3? CHAPTER 3? This is why we can’t have nice horror movies in America. Gotta fucking franchise everything.
James Wan has even gone down this road before. He directed Saw and watched it drivel into a sorry state of a franchise. He did The Conjuring, which was great, and that followed up by a terrible Annabelle from someone else. This franchise from the first to Chapter 2, I have always found it just okay, but at least he directed the sequel. He didn’t let someone Saw the fuck out of it.
Until now. Now it is directed by his writing friend, Leigh Whannell. So Wan hasn’t completely abandoned it for the super hero films he is now directing, but it is still just another film series that doesn’t need any new material.
What made the news of this sequel even more disappointing was finding out that it was a prequel. Prequels sound great because they can answer questions directly that might have been brought up about the past. But Paranormal Activity 3 tried to do this method and all it did was waste our times and actually answer close to nothing.
Good. A new face to the franchise who won’t affect anything at all.
Hey, that new face has a name. Quinn (Stefanie Scott)! And she has an issue. Her mom died awhile ago and now she thinks her mom might be trying to contact her. She tried the normal methods of contact and nothing worked.
So she found herself on the door steps of Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye). She heard she was a powerful psychic who could talk to those in the afterlife. But an accident in Elise’s life had her retire, vowing to never do it again. But eh, the plot has to move along some how, so she does it anyways. Elise doesn’t like what she sees, so she tells Quinn to never try to contact her mom again.
And guess what? Now Quinn and Elise have a demon fucking with them. It gets worse when Quinn gets hit by a car, breaking her legs. Now she has to rely on her dad (Dermot Mulroney) and younger brother (Tate BerneyT) to take care of her. She has a bell to ring when she needs help, a nice sudden sound making device to make things extra creepy.
This film also shows where Elise meets Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Leigh Whannell), who of course you would recognize from the previous, set in the future, movies.
When jumping around the time domain, sometimes colors get all sorts of fucky.
What does one do with a drunken franchise, early in the morning? That is the only way I know how to describe Insidious, as its movies attempt to give us something deep but end up just stumbling around all the place, slurring their words, and personally thinking they are the best. The first two films ended up being weird, with a couple of random scares. In Chapter 3, we got the prequel that no one wanted. Did we need to see how Elise and her goons met? No. No we did not. Now, it also alluded that shit went wrong for her in the past, and thankfully they answered that question through dealing with demons in this film. But why not have an actually younger Elise, facing that problem head on before she retired from psychic shit? Actually change up how we see the character?
Instead this film takes place, I don’t know, a year or something before Insidious. If you were reading this as a book, it would be a confusing placement to throw in a flashback chapter for people who have been supporting (albeit important) characters.
Unfortunately, this film is also the weakest of the three in terms of plots and actual scares. It stars a family that I end up feeling nothing for, despite their hardships, because it isn’t the same characters as the first two films. There is no Chapter 4 currently planned, but the director/writer/costar said that if it was, he would probably place it after 3 in the plotline, but before the first. That would officially just turn this series into “Elise and the Boys Para-normally battling demons!” That is fine, but to me that clearly just makes 3 and 4 spin-off films, and it is kind of shit that they are just calling it Insidious.
Most of this review is just arguing semantics. That aside, I didn’t like the film, and thought it was a boring side story from an already meh series.