One of the Worst

Rating: 1/10 (1 February 2012)

I want to preface this by saying I am a very big horror film fan. I've seen a lot of horror films, and I have great respect for the genre. Having said that, this is one of the worst horror films I've ever seen in my life. I paid $1.50 to see this at the theater, and I want my small change back.
There are so many weak points in this film, it's hard to begin with just one. I'll begin with the weakest, the directing. Now I'm a fan of Wann's original Saw and Dead Silence was even tolerable at points. Insidious is just one big whiff. The decisions the characters made at points were so unbearable that I contemplated just leaving the theater early. The part that has stood out to me to be one of the worst parenting moves in the history of film was when the mother finds the sheets covering her son with bloody hand prints on them, and she just waits for her husband to come home to "deal with it"? No calling the cops, no getting her family out of the house, just wait outside on the porch (with whatever did that inside with her son alone) for her husband to come home? Another point was when her husband is doing his out-of-body experience or whatever, we're supposed to just forget about that and be surprised later in the film that his son can do it too? Lastly what bothered me about the directing was when the husband is in his class room and "Wann" and the doll from Saw are written on the chalk board. This is just flat out classlessness. Not only am I pulled-out of the story, but I'm not thinking of the film at all. I'm thinking of how pretentious the director is for having those in the background.
The acting was just so atrocious that I cannot even begin to describe how the actors "tried" to look scared. It's like they just graduated from acting school and were going over the script in their heads thinking, "okay, I have to be angry or scared now", then cue the cliché look.
The last points I'm going to gripe about will pertain to the directing again. These are things I've heard the most when people have complaints about the film; the sudden shift of what the film is half way though. The first half is a sort-of Paranormal Activity with a bigger budget, then the second half is Dead Silence/haunted house experience. The first half was the most fitting for the film since the film is named Insidious. The second half came out of nowhere and wasn't called for by any justification. I compare it to Dead Silence, because of the way the dead people's make-up and movements were done. It's as if they just walked off the Dead Silence set and walked right onto the Insidious set. This sudden change in the pacing and tone of the film made it seem like it didn't know what it wanted to be.
All in all, I cannot recommend this for anyone. This is just another sad excuse for a horror film that unfortunately got popular, which means there will be sequels to suffer through.