Scary at first but then turns into a remake of Poltergeist

Rating: 6/10 (30 April 2012)

Insidious is a strange movie. I can't remember being initially so unsettled by a horror movie for a long time (maybe White Noise all those years ago, the first viewing of Paranormal Activity perhaps) but it soon descends into a rip-off of more than one "classic" horror and ends up being almost a word for word re-write of Poltergeist. The eerie moving furniture, the parent having to enter the netherworld to retrieve the child, the ageing female medium that can see the dead and her two buffoon like cohorts that walk around with their Ghostbuster wands. "Walk to my voice", "Only you can save him" and so on. At the end, if skeletons had risen from an underground graveyard I'd have laughed out loud, but thankfully there was some saving grace in the ending. Even there though, it's well enough done but it's not a shock. In fact I'd suggest that anyone who didn't see it coming, is at best, very new to Horror.
So why the 6 rating? Because it's a product of it's time. It's not original, in fact it's so unoriginal with regard to one particular film that it will be viewed as almost a joke movie to some, but as a standalone scary film (and especially if you're young or new to Horror) it's quite creepy at first and a reasonable stab at the genre. I do wish it had lived up to it's start, not been so predictable and not been so overtly a remake of Poltergeist but I guess it's hard to be truly original in Horror nowadays.