Un-scariest movie I have already seen 8 or 9 times in my whole life.

Rating: 4/10 (20 July 2013)

(No spoilers until fourth paragraph) First of all, I pre-apologize to anyone who disagrees with me on this; it's only my point of view and you can tell me how I'm wrong if you want, in fact I'd welcome some escape from this utter disappointment. I saw The Conjuring today after all the waiting and reading of accolades from trusted critics, friends and strangers with seemingly otherwise good taste, articulation and history of horror film viewership. The only bad reviews I'd seen so far sounded like they came from 15-year-olds who probably expected another 'Saw.' I tried to avoid too many spoilers so that all I knew beforehand was that the movie's 'R' rating was apparently based purely on its scariness, since it had no nudity or cursing and virtually no direct violence or gore. This sounded right up my alley, since that describes a lot of the creepiest movie experiences I've had. I had also heard it compared to Amityville Horror and The Exorcist a lot, but always with the caveat that it had plenty of originality and stand-alone storyline and scares.
I came out of the theater wondering if I saw the same movie everyone was raving about, or this was some kind of dream or prank. This was the un-scariest movie I have already seen 8 or 9 times in my whole life.
My spoiler-free review in a nutshell is: If you are considering seeing this movie, haven't already seen a lot of ghost/demon movies and have an appreciation for God/Satan-centered horror, you might like it. By the way, it isn't my atheist-leaning agnosticism that makes the style offensive to me; it's the total unoriginality and uncreativity of it. I'd much more highly recommend others of the 70's era in the ghost genre with totally original concepts that don't lean on religion, such as The Changeling, or my favorite movie of all time, The Shining. In fact I would probably rather rewatch any of a number of not-bad ghost films I've already seen at least twice, like The Others or The 6th Sense, before I'd give up 113 minutes watching The Conjuring again. It's that tedious to me.
The comparison to Amityville and Exorcist is more than apt; it's truly a head/tail hybrid of those two movies (in that order), where what starts out as a haunted house movie turns in to a demon possession one. The house turns out to have a lot of history of course, garden variety murders and suicides, but the main evil stems from the spirit a woman who, get this, was an accused Salem witch (cheap) and get THIS, really was a Satan worshipper....woooOOO! So of course it takes the Christian incantations of a demon-fightin' power couple and the love of the family in the center of the story to overcome the demon that has possessed the mother, in a scene embarrassingly reminiscent of the Carol Anne rescue scenes in Poltergeist 1 and 2 (and of course Exorcist). Actually 99% of the scare devices used in this movie were things we've all seen in a bunch of other movies. I saw it in a theater that was not Imax/RPX but with a very big screen and lots of loud speakers. All the loud noises and music in the last 20 minutes only made me wish it was over sooner, since by then I had already stopped hoping for anything interesting to happen. The acting and cinematography were fine but not nearly enough to make for a great horror film.