Director John Leonetti and writer Gary Dauberman have put together a very surprising doll-movie. With Child's Play jumping the shark to land on 2013's Curse of Chucky one expects to see a sassy, knife wielding murderous little doll running around in this movie as well but predictable just isn't scary and Annabelle is scary. A lot of horror movie clichés are being broken these days. I thank and blame YouTube for pointing them out on a relentless basis but it leads to some new movies like this one. While Annabelle tries to break the mold with new and original scares, unfortunately it is mostly achieved by borrowing other clichéd scares not typically associated with haunted dolls. Still, for the new horror fan, it's got plenty of thrills and for the old and jaded viewer, it's changed things up plenty to keep you guessing.
Thought that was a little generic? It was. This movie is all about surprise and it's just impossible to review much about it without MAJOR SPOILERS. Please be warned.
This is the second movie I've reviewed set in a pre-cell phone era. Terrors have trouble with being on YouTube and their victims summoning help quickly and easily but I can forgive them. It creates isolation. The movie opens in a bloody and violent fashion which mirrors Chucky's origin a little too obviously, but everyone knew the doll was haunted coming in, and they move on quickly.
My fear of the story dwelling on the 'helpless pregnant wife' vanishes with a puff smoke when the story jumps ahead and we see Mia, played by Annabelle Wallis (yes, the star's name is Annabelle) dominating her painfully subservient doctor husband, played by Ward Horton. The meat of the story is Mia protecting her daughter from the supernatural. It smacks heavily of both Ghostbusters and Poltergeist. They run through the classic 'you're crazy - no I'm not' but quickly blow away all that noise with some horrific events clearing Mia's name.
The story drags Mia through satanic cult worship, deals with demons and lands smack dab on the worn duo of disorientation and illusion. Leaving the audience unsure as to what is real, the director could excuse any failing as illusion but only pulls that trick once. It is very refreshing that, while they are reusing a lot of material, they have enough to avoid using anything too often, and a lot of it just once. The movie winds down by nearly killing someone and then pulling a switch on who dies at the end, even reminding the viewer that there were clues that this would happen all along.
In a completely original event, we have a serious fire, in a horror movie, that doesn't manage to kill anyone or even burn the house down. Leonetti and Dauberman are borrowing stuff, but when they do it like this, and put their own spin on it, it becomes a gem. They try hard to be this creative with the rest of the movie and there are some other gems hidden in this one.
Set up for a sequel, I'm desperately curious to see what they would do. Would they try borrowing all sorts of new material? Would they look at this movie, see what new things worked and keep using them? I would only hope they don't copy the same tricks over again, because that defined the 80's and 90's horror genre sequels.
No comments:
Post a Comment