Everyone said it was oh-so-scary...

Rating: 4/10 (13 June 2011)

Okay, well I had heard nothing but praise for "Insidious" and that it was the scariest movie of 2011 so far. So naturally I gave the movie a go, being the horror aficionado that I am.
And I will say this much praise for the movie, it was great up until half way through, give or take. The first half of the movie was actually quite good, because it was building up a lot of dread and suspense. And there was a certain feel to the movie, the sort of feel you had going on in the old "Poltergeist" movie. You slowly got to see more and more of the haunting and whatever entity it was that was the cause of this.
But then you find out what it was, and the movie started to crack and fail. I was thinking they can't be serious about this. So now I know what happened the Darth Maul. Wow, talk about being a major disappointment in revealing what was doing the haunting. I am sure the concept was working well enough, but this Darth Maul look-alike clone? No, not really working out all that much.
And to top it off; when Josh went into "The Further", as they cleverly called the Astral Plane. That was painful to sit through and look at. There was nothing out of this world about that at all, and it was a shame, because it would otherwise have added a very cool element to the movie.
Now, "Insidious" is more interesting and more spooky than both of the "Paranormal Activities", and that is a big plus. Because they were major disappointments in each their own way. I read that someone compared "Insidious" to "Saw" and said that "Insidious" was more scary? Ehm, yeah, two completely different genre of movies here, so you can't really compare the two. "Insidious" had a lot going on for it, especially in the first half of the movie, but then it snapped and went spiraling downward fast. And the whole "Poltergeist" feeling (or tribute, not sure what the director was going for), also worked out well for the movie.
As for the cast and their acting, well I think they had managed to put together a decent enough ensemble of people here. And it was a bit weird to see Patrick Wilson (playing Josh Lambert) in a movie of this genre. But he did pull off the character and came through with a good performance, so the genre change worked for him. Lin Shaye (playing Elise Rainer) had some big shoes to fill out, standing up against the iconic character Tangina (played by Zelda Rubinstein) in the classic "Poltergeist" movies. But still, Lin Shaye did it well and added her own unique touch to the movie.
I had been looking forward to watching "Insidious", but was sorely disappointed. My low rating for the movie is because of the nature of the entity behind the haunting and the last half of the movie. Had the entity been something else, a high rating would have been given. What pulls up the score is the dread and suspense that the movie managed to build up in the first half. I will say that for a horror movie, then "Insidious" does a better job than many others.
"Insidious" provides adequate entertainment for an evening in front of the screen, but for those who have been addicted to the horror movies for many, many years (like I have), there is just something unsatisfying about the end result.