Not as insidious and scary as it could have been

Rating: 6/10 (1 July 2012)

The trailer is very good and makes you want to watch the movie, although it spoils a few things, so better to avoid if you can. The first half (in the first house) is superbly done: building up suspense, making you unsure what to expect and basically making you focus on the corners of the screens (away from the characters) to anticipate what might appear. This "where's Waldo game" starts in the credits where some of pictures have something that shouldn't be there or moving. Scares relied on creepy sounds, shadows, inanimate objects moving and quick glimpses of human shapes and faces where they shouldn't be. So, traditional stuff, but it was creepy, and I was buying it. Then not long after the start of the second half, something weird happened as the more things got supernatural, the less I was involved, the less I was unnerved to the point of being quite calm near the end. That big problem, especially for a horror film supposed to be climaxing, might have been caused by 3 possible things: the introduction of comic relief nerd exorcists, the shift from haunted house story to possession story and showing too much of the "entities" (as in lingering too long).
Speaking of which, some of the most memorable parts involved a red-faced "demon" appearing quickly where it shouldn't be and as a shadow later on. Near the end, the more you saw of him, the less disturbing he became, showing the limitations of his design. So we have a two-headed beast film here: the first half of the movie, scarier, more subtle, insidious even, would be a 8 for remarkable; the second half, flashier, less scary yet still entertaining, would be a 4 for slightly below average. The acting from the family was decent. The acting from the paranormal investigators, especially the old woman, sometimes veered close to caricature. Jump scares weren't cheap, false alert ones and some clichés were intentionally avoided (as heard in the extras). There was some blood but not anything gory or physically disgusting. The Blu-Ray extras, all put together, are a paltry 20 minutes long. If you like that kind of film, you could be doing worse than renting this one, but I wouldn't buy it sight unseen.
Rating: 6 out of 10 (good)