Solid filmmaking triumphs over the clichés

Rating: 7/10 (19 April 2014)

Haunted house movies have become so similar and generic in their content and style, that's it's getting harder and harder to tell a good one from a bad one these days. "Insidious Chapter 2" strikes me as a fairly good one - at least up to a point. It's not that there's anything particularly groundbreaking or new about it; it's just that the level of filmmaking is a notch or two above what one frequently finds in the genre.
Written by Leigh Wannell and directed by James Wan, "Insidious Chapter 2" follows the standard blueprint for films in this genre: a couple with young children finds itself bedeviled by restless spirits in an old Victorian house that, just from the looks of it, practically screams "Haunted." We're already familiar with most of the characters from the original "Insidious," including Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson as the distraught parents and "Entity" star Barbara Hershey as the grandmother. There's the usual calling in of ghost-hunters and the standard mumbo-jumbo about "the other side," but at least "Insidious Chapter 2" goes that extra step by actually entering into that alternate world and confronting the spirits residing therein.
"Insidious Chapter 2" is a bit too derivative of "The Shining" in the dad's seeming descent into madness and possession and his posing a threat to the safety of his family (a baseball bat and a fire extinguisher have replaced the ax in the earlier picture as the weapon of choice here). And even though the movie wanders off into some pretty goofy territory in its second half, the excellent cinematography, imagery and sound effects manage to keep the fright meter in the red zone for most of the duration.
And credit those who made the film for having the good taste to include a brief clip of Herk Harvey's seminal 1962 classic "Carnival of Souls," one of the creepiest horror films of all time, playing on a TV nearby. Now THERE was a groundbreaking film!