Almost Decent Haunted House Movies Turns Stupid

Rating: Null/10 (17 August 2015)

Hollywood has a strange notion of what a scary movie is. What they think is "scary" is actually "surprised." You can get over being surprised, but if you're really absolutely positively scared, you will still feel that cold shiver you got three to four years later while remembering what scared you, but then that's just me. I've read so much about real ghosts that the fake stuff in the movies doesn't chill me at all. Even modern horror movies don't know what it takes to really scare people. Compare a weak installment like "Occulus" to movies like "The Amityville Horror" or "The Others," movies you likely watched between your fingers, and you realize it's what you think you're going to see that is going to scare you. It's because older horror movies knew how to exploit what scared you. Today, movies like "The Conjuring," "Insidious" and "Sinister" try to follow in that vein with the addition of adding disturbing imagery within chilling shadowy settings. What we have with "The Conjuring" is a file from Ed and Lorraine Warren. It is "based" on a true story, but since it has been embellished, exaggerated and had fake incidents added, the movie is about as fictional as the books claiming John Wilkes Booth escaped. It tells the story of the Perron family and the hauntings they experienced on their Rhode Island farm. The opening activity consists of poltergeist activity and odd sounds, it's charming and quaint, adding atmosphere to a story that should be building in intensity but instead goes Hollywood with the arrival of Ed and Lorraine Warren, self-proclaimed demonologists who Hans Holzer called "religious zealots posing as paranormal researchers." I'm not sure what really happened at the Perron Farm, but anything concerning the Warrens always go from a straight haunted house movie to a bad rip-off of "The Exorcist." Is the movie scary? Yes. Is it a good plot? Hell, no. What the movie does have is a good cast, some decent special effects and several good scares, but it's only the first half of the movie is really watching before it descends into malarkey about demons and ends with a very unnecessary possession/exorcism scene which doesn't add or further the plot except to add some disturbing scenes to a movie that was already only partially scary to begin with. If anything, "The Conjuring" runs like two different movies badly edited together – the first half a pretty decent haunted house move, the last half a really disturbing and sometimes really loud exorcism flick. Be warned and only watch the first half of this movie and switch it off when the Warrens meet the Perrons because by then, it's just not worth watching from that point.