Things that go "Ahhhhh!" in a laughably unscary manner in the night

Rating: 3/10 (18 November 2014)

Insidious was an ace haunted house film although it did get a bit silly towards the end. The family are back and still getting haunted. James Wan made the excellent The Conjuring and was clearly putting all of his effort into that. So maybe he was too focused on that to actually direct this film at all. The first was excellent; yet this is a laughably awful and heartbreakingly lazy follow up. It had the same cast, same good director and some good trailers. How did this happen? James Wan has a few filmmaking tricks up his sleeve, and there are a couple of good scares. The rest of the time, it's a long, boring slog towards a monumentally convoluted and clichéd conclusion. As toys go beep beep in the night, pianos play by themselves, ghosts shriek, people stand around and explain the plot, fog obscures everything and the ghosts do more shrieking, don loads of white face paint, do their best Captain Jack Sparrow impersonations and go ludicrously over the top I nearly switched it off. And I never turn films off once I've started.
Insidious Chapter 2 is like an F grade film studies exercise where the task was to make the audience jump. The film is composed of jarring jump scares which drain the tension and at times the film is unintentionally hilarious. The script is dreadful: It consists of exposition, jump scares and.... that's it. The acting is awful as well and it is difficult to get behind the haunted family when all you want them to do is head to the nearest acting class. Virtually every aspect of it is lazy, clichéd and underwhelming. Every thing in this film has been seen before and there aren't any surprises. It doesn't even want to be its own movie. It spends a good chunk trying to tie up loose ends from the first film. IC2 is one of the worst horror sequels I've seen. It's probably not one of the worst as I haven't seen that many horror sequels but this is a waste of everyone's time. Rather offensively, a third installment is on the way and this has a 6.6 rating on IMDb. LAME.
2/10