You know your film is in real trouble when the most disturbing element is hearing Australian comic Angus Sampson putting on a thick American accent

Rating: 1/10 (25 May 2011)

A couple, Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrnes), move into their new home with their three children. They have twin boys, Dalton (Ty Simpkins) and Foster (Andrew Astor) and a baby too. Josh works as a teacher, while Renai stays at home to look after the baby and work on her music career. When strange things start happening in the house, Renai begins to panic. She has visions of small children running through the house and is also hearing loud disruptive noises. After Dalton has a fall in the attic he slips into a coma. The doctors say that he does not have brain damage but the boy is left bedridden inside the house. When even more disturbing events occur like bloody handprints appearing on the sheets, both Patrick and Rose are convinced that their house is now haunted. Helping them move into a second house is Patrick's mother Lorraine (Barbara Hershey), but they find that the paranormal world still follows them.
Horror movies are always full of boring, stupid people. They shriek, ask 'what the hell was that' like they've never seen a horror movie before and enter dark rooms by themselves. Insidious went to this school of horror and spent all its time copying notes off Paranormal Activity (2007). The film is directed by James Wan, who gave us the first Saw, but producer Oren Peli's stamp is visible. He made the first Paranormal Activity and the plots are so lazily similar that you can pinpoint the moment the psychics will show up. This is a copy of a film that was already a rehash of every haunted house clichÃ©. True, it is a break from the torture porn trend but it's only to fall back on the first tier of horror clichÃ©s, like creaking doors and mysterious falling objects. Unoriginality is not even the film's biggest sin though: it's unintentionally funny rather than scary. The way the opening titles come up is like a throwback to 1950s schlock horror, except they're not playing for laughs. The tone, visually provided through the film's ugly, muted colour filters, is deadly serious. But it's very difficult not to laugh at this brand of horror because it's been parodied so often. In its favour, it's a marginally better film than Paranormal Activity because it's unconcerned about masking the artifice. Wan omits any phony quasi-documentary aesthetics and the narrative is more eventful in its final quarter. But it's also in the last fifteen minutes that the story moves from otherworldly and into, let's say politely, nonsense. It mistakenly shows the monsters and also tries to explain their existence through lazy slabs of expositional dialogue. It's saved by some slightly creepy imagery, though I'm certain they've pinched some from the video game Bioshock (2007). And the demon cheaply looks like a man in a rubber suit, who'd be more suited to tapping people on the shoulder in a ghost train. Typically for a horror film the characters are underwritten and the cast is misused. Wilson and Byrnes are not the most annoying horror couple but they lack distinctive voices and any life they share exterior from the house is empty. With very few lines or actions, Barbra Hershey is terribly underused. But you know your film is in real trouble when the most disturbing element is hearing Australian comic Angus Sampson putting on a thick American accent.