I am pretty sure you've seen this film before

Rating: 7/10 (7 April 2014)

The fact that the cast and the name are different does not change the situation. You've seen this film before. Whether it was "The Exorcism of (enter name here)" or something else in the range of supernatural possession or even alien abductions, the plot is the same: family moves in the middle of nowhere for no good reason, bad things start happening, a team of "specialists" come to the rescue and the movie ends with a "based on a true story" line.
For me The Conjuring was slightly different because the film was recommended to me by a friend who pointed out the subtle camera work and the good old fashioned scares. So that leaves me in a dilemma: do I appreciate the movie as a standalone horror, forcing myself to ignore the entire list of similar movies since the 80s till now, or do I denounce this as a shameless clone of so many films of the genre? One has to wonder: if the viewer sees this type of movie for the first time, is it not a good movie if they enjoy it?
But I cannot try to judge all of this based on the pleasures of some hypothetical person. I have to rate it based on what I know, and what I know is that I have seen this film before and cloning it does not one an artist make, but a Xerox at most.
Bottom line: every single line, every scene, even the effects and camera work, for all of them I had the strong feeling that I have seen them before. And, alas, they also happened exactly as I had predicted minutes before, down to the makeup and sound effects. I can't really appreciate that. I have seen a lot of crappy movies and some of them copies of other crappy films that I have seen before, but each one brought something slightly new: a monster that was different, a situation, a character type. Just enough to make a small difference. The Conjuring brings nothing new to the table, absolutely nothing.