Annabelle

Note: As of this posting I’ve decided to wrap up my review for the time being.  I still have several months of posts to edit, but not all of the series I was working on will be reviewed in their entirety.  The only one I still intend to finish is the show Nightmares and Dreamscapes.

This is another case of a movie that was just boring in the theatre being more tolerable in my living room, as I struggle to care enough to pay attention.  Annabelle is a bad film, no doubt, but it’s much harder to be mad at on my television screen.  In fact, after I completed my second viewing of it, I found myself disappointed that I originally saw it in theatres before I began this blog, and was thus unable to compare my current reaction to my earlier viewing.

I have the same bias against this movie that I have against The Conjuring, of course. That is, I don’t believe in absolute good or evil in the sense that this movie promotes it.  However, where the first film was able to at least attempt to squeeze some degree of realism from it’s boring story, Annabelle has gone so far off the tracks of anything Ed and Lorraine Warren ever claimed that it’s impossible not to role your eyes.

Before the events of The Conjuring, John and Mia Form (Annabelle Wallis and Ward Horton) move into a new house in which they hope to raise their first child together.  John, being a loving husband, gives Mia the beautiful antique doll we all saw in the first movie.  However, shortly after they move in, the “real” Annabelle Higgins (even IMDB can’t give me the actress), daughter their neighbors, returns with her boyfriend to kill her parents and attack their neighbors.  John and the police intervene, and Annabelle Higgins commits suicide while holding the doll.

It’s never made entirely clear what kind of bizarro cult Annabelle and her boyfriend were members of.  It’s referred to as satanic, but that could just be the 1970s calling anything outside of monotheism and Eastern religions “Satanism.”  Either way, it seems like a shallow excuse for demon summoning.

Naturally, the doll is possessed by a demon pretending to be the ghost of Annabelle.  If I can say one positive thing about the movie, it’s that they don’t waste our time trying to force a premise we learned in the first move into a twist.  We have a priest on hand (Tony Amendola) ready to tell us that no, it’s not really a ghost, it’s a demon.

The twist we do get, however?  A baby is not able to offer its soul to a demon.  Apparently, that was supposed to be surprising, but the movie tells us that the demon wants a human soul offered willingly, but still expects us to believe that its target is John and Mia’s infant daughter.  No points for figuring out the goal is to get the mother to trade her soul for the child.

The ending confuses me deeply.  Our token black character, Evelyn (Alfie Woodard), leaps out a window in exchange for the infant.  Apparently, this was an attempt to atone for the death of Evelyn’s daughter Ruby, in a car crash she blames herself for.  But, did Evelyn go to hell?  Apparently committing suicide to save her innocent daughter would have sent Mia downstairs, but Ruby’s death was God’s plan?  I have no idea what just happened.

The scene that amused me most in this movie was seeing Tony Amendola attacked by a demon and live.  But, that was more of an inside joke.  My primary reason for getting frustrated with Stargate: SG-1 was the show’s utter unwillingness to kill off any important characters after ten years.  I’m a believer in the occasional character death as a necessary sacrifice for good drama, and Amendola’s character practically had “I will be a martyr with a great death scene” stapled to his forehead.  Notably, I directly asked him at a convention if there was ever talk of killing off Bra’tac, and he confirmed “all the time!”  Apparently Amendola just won’t die.

But, overall, there isn’t much to recommend here.  It’s a bad movie, you might not regret watching it on DVD, but people don’t regret much on DVD.  There are better time wasters out there.