Nothing new here

Rating: 5/10 (26 November 2013)

The main problem with a movie like "The Conjuring" is that it assumes that none of us have ever been to a haunted house movie before (perhaps not an entirely unwarranted assumption given that the characters in these movies clearly never have or they'd know better than to move into one of these houses in the first place).
You know the drill. Unsuspecting family from the city buys an old place in the country. Weird things begin to happen. Ghostbusters are brought in to investigate. Turns out some restless spirits, the victims of various ghastly crimes in the past, are roaming around the place searching for someone to free them from their predicament so they can move on and find eternal peace. Supernatural pandemonium ensues. Roll credits. The End.
This one is set in 1971 (the girls are watching "Brady Bunch" reruns in the middle of the afternoon long before the show ever went into syndication, but then I doubt that facts are high on the agenda for these filmmakers). Lily Taylor and Ron Livingston play the parents of five daughters who become bedeviled by some evil forces lurking in the dark recesses of the creaky old fixer-upper they've purchased in rural Rhode Island. Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson are the world-famous paranormal researchers, the Warrens, who attempt to exorcise the demons from the place.
The kind of movie for which a spoiler alert is practically superfluous, "The Conjuring" is allegedly based on a true story, a come-on that might have been more convincing had the movie not seemed so much like every other haunted house movie we've ever seen. I'd like to believe that even ghosts can't be this boringly predictable.
Maybe someday someone somewhere will come up with something new that will breathe some much-needed life into the genre. Till then, I guess, movies like "The Conjuring" - and there will be many more to come, I'm sure - will just have to do.