Highly impressive supernatural chiller

Rating: 9/10 (19 December 2014)

Falling victim to a slew of strange experiences, a couple's attempts to find the cause of their woes center on their comatose son's journey into a world inhabited by demons and forces them to travel there to bring him back alive.
This was quite an exciting and enjoyable effort that has a lot going for it. One of it's better features is the fact that there's a lot more going on in the story than just the usual haunted house tropes that are found in such efforts, as here we not only get those fun and enjoyable supernatural tones throughout the first half when they're constantly under attack in the old home that results in some great scenes as the attack in the bedroom and the blaring alarm constantly going off, this is then based quite nicely off the second half where it turns into a demonic attack effort with all the paranormal investigations throughout the house before finally unveiling the final half which is the cleverest aspect of all these different efforts. Each one tends to lead into the others quite well as the early stuff is based on the threat of something there but not quite seen to determine how to go about dealing with the claims which are used to great effect in actually getting them out of the house where they knowingly experienced something creepy and dangerous going on. The paranormal investigations are likewise a lot of fun by getting all the usual jump-scares out and really using the large, sprawling house to great effect in generating some fine scares throughout here. Even more to the point, this concerns the film's highlight sequence in the séance into the different dimension that contains some truly freaky ideas before fully unleashing the action into hyper-drive with a stellar, exciting and action-packed sequence that really sells this quite well. The atmosphere in the final half does have some great uses here especially the different demons interacting throughout here as well as the sequences with the mannequins which are unnerving and truly chilling works that altogether give this a highly impressive series of events. It really only falters in a few areas, namely the finale which is obvious the second the trick is mentioned twenty minutes earlier about the freed-hosts' body and never really has a chance to surprise because of the obvious nature of what happened. Likewise, the fact that this one is so dependent on reusing storyline ideas from other films and even filming whole sequences wholesale from those efforts does cause this a little bit of distress as there's just enough here to make this feel as though we've seen it all before yet is still original enough to matter here. These do hold it down slightly, but not enough to still make this a highly entertaining and chilling effort.
Rated PG-13: Violence, Language and children-in-jeopardy.