Had the potential to be great

Rating: 5/10 (20 March 2012)

I've been keeping myself away from horror movies and such since I usually always end up being disappointed. Insidious did however intrigue me, and I've been wanting to see it ever since I was at a screening with my girlfriend and Saw Horrible bosses. The director James Wan has previously impressed me with titles such as Saw, Dead silence (not that good, but a classic itself), and thusly decided to rent the movie and watch it. The haunted houses and questionable children is something that have been recycled throughout many many movies, but if they still work and impress in this day and age, It's usually a mixture of both visuals and the actors talent.
The movie actually impressed me, as I found it to be really really good the first seventy minutes or so, with no trace of Hollywood destroying the movie; something I've seen and experienced with many movies that could've been great (Gothika, Drag me to hell, Silent hill, you name them).
However.. as soon as Josh (played by Patrick Wilson) is about to travel to "the further" I knew I was up for a major disappointment. When you build a foundation for a horror movie that based on a recycled idea and actually pull it off, make it interesting and make the jumpy moments innovating and actually "new" to the genre, it's NOT a great idea to destroy the last thirty minutes of the movie by having one of the characters in the movie fight a ghost with terrible cgi effects. It's not a great idea to have one of the demons crawl across a wall with once again, crappy cgi effects. It's further not really bright to squeeze in various demons and ghosts into a closet and make a terrible attempt at scaring the audience in a manner that probably wouldn't even scare a twelve-year-old.
The movie piled up, and simply became too much. It felt really rushed towards the end, and turned from being a perfectly enjoyable and intriguing psychological jumpy horror flick to being something that Hollywood (once again) completely destroyed. Since I actually enjoyed the first seventy minutes one might think that 5/10 is somewhat unfair. I do however not. I tend to remember the final moments of a movie; those are the one that usually sticks with me, and if they in one way or another destroy what the movie has been trying to achieve I almost always end up unimpressed.