The Conjuring

Okay, time for the unpopular opinion: I don’t like The Conjuring.  Everyone knows the spin-off sucks (update: the reaction to Annabelle 2, released the same weekend I’m editing and uploading this for later posting, has been better), and I somewhat enjoyed the second film.  But the original is just unenjoyable to me.  My problems boil down to three things:

* I don’t buy Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) or their worldview.  It’s a black-and-white way of looking at the world that kills my suspension of disbelief.  This is a personal thing, yes, but if God, the Devil, demons, and angels are all real, I think they have more interesting things to do than knocking on a door three times, over and over again, to mock their opposing faction.

*While the era was great at producing horror movies, I find that horror movies set in the 1970s often don’t work.  It’s something about the hair and the clothes.  The entire world just looks unreal to me, like a sitcom with no budget for wardrobe.

*More specific to this movie, we get the parts of both a serious thriller and a B-movie.  We spend most of the film building up with investigation of the paranormal, and then get a cheesy, over-the-top CGI-fest of a climax.

Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t scary moments.  There certainly are, and I honestly would have preferred that the movie stick to its boring but creepy dramatic route.  Many real-world haunting stories are scary because they ultimately don’t make a lot of sense, while The Conjuring movies seem quite determined to wrap things up in a neat little package, even when the actual events that inspired the movie were far less clear-cut.

Roger and Carolyn Perron (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor) move into an old farm house with their five children.  Strange events start happening, with the usual knocks, movements, and kids reporting imaginary friends.  There is a particularly frightening sequence in which Carolyn plays a version of hide-and-seek called “three claps” with one of her daughters, and finds herself drawn into another room by an unexplained clap.

Ed and Lorraine are called on the scene, however, and ironically do exactly what they always did in real life: give everything that happens a demonic explanation in terms of their interpretation of Catholic theology.  Rather than the male ghost indicated earlier, we now have a nominally female demon who possessed a previous owner of the property and forced her to kill her own baby in a sacrifice to the devil (but for some reason they keep referring to the demon as “Bathsheba,” the name of the woman).

In the final act, the witch possesses Carolyn Perron in an attempt to kill her children.  This kills any remaining suspension of belief as suddenly every half-baked theory the Warrens put forward is completely confirmed, and all ambiguity is gone.  It also turns the evil force into something that can be tangibly fought, as Ed Warren attempts to perform an exorcism himself.

This is something the real Ed Warren claims to have done, but I know enough about exorcisms to know they’re never really the fast epiphany therapy movies portray.  Here, however, we get the standard gross-out, hurt the victim, and it’s all fixed by the power of love ending.  It’s too tangible, too easy, and generally too Hollywood for a truly scary movie.

So, do I recommend The Conjuring? No.  I didn’t like it in theatres, and I don’t like it now.  Whether you want drama or B-movie, there are far better choices available.  The Conjuring 2 is among them.

Saw

The first Saw was a good movie. Looking back at it now, having seen all 7, this is the only film that I can call “good” without reservation. The story is strong, so the plot holes don’t bother me that much. The performances are excellent, so I don’t mind how contrived the situations are. Beyond that, there’s a real sense of story-telling. While I may not like all his films, James Wan knows how to direct a movie.

Saw actually seems like something of an oddity in the series it spawned. Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) is in only a few scenes, with the identity of the Jigsaw killer being a mystery for most of the film. In later films Bell become so crucial to the success of the franchise they used extensive flashbacks in a desperate move to keep him in the series after Jigsaw's death. Here, however, the most prominent characters are Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) and Detective David Tapp (Danny Glover), mainly because the producers were able to get Cary Elwes and Danny Glover in a film that was supposed to go straight-to-DVD before the test audiences went nuts for it.

I’m also not the first nor the last person to note that this is the only film in the series in which Jigsaw personally uses a weapon with lethal intent against another human being. It seems downright bizarre, and it’s one of the few things that later films don’t even try to explain. I’ll freely admit it bothers the hell out of me, as it is something I can’t imagine the later Jigsaw doing. The plot makes far more sense if we just imagine that the cloaked man in that scene was Detective Hoffman from the later films disguising his voice.

The movie opens with Dr. Gordon waking up in a long-abandoned bathroom with a man named Adam (Leigh Whannell). Both are chained to the wall, with tapes, a tape recorder, and hacksaws that can’t cut through their chains, but could cut through their feet. Gordon is told that he has a limited period of time to kill Adam or his wife and daughter will both be killed. What appears to be a dead man is in the middle of the room, in a puddle of blood, holding a gun. While trying to find a way out, the two talk and we get a series of flashbacks gradually revealing the story. They’re being held by the Jigsaw Killer, a mysterious figure who places victims in elaborate traps with only the barest chance of escape, creating situations in which they kill themselves.

Doctor Gordon was a suspect in the case because his penlight was found at the scene of one of the traps, and the increasingly unstable, now discharged, Detective Tapp still believes he’s Jigsaw. Tapp’s storyline is shown to us in flashback parallel to Gordon's, as Tapp's partner (Ken Leung) is killed by a trap, and Tapp becomes obsessed with Gordon. We eventually discover that the detective is the connection between the two men, having hired Adam to follow and photograph Gordon.

We’re also treated to a few brief glimpses of Jigsaw’s traps, and some short scenes with Gordon’s wife and daughter (Monica Potter and Makenzie Vega) being held hostage by Zep (Michael Emerson), and employee at Gordon's hospital, and the decoy villain. These work well, the performances are all pretty good. They somehow manage to achieve more than the long asides used in later films in a fraction of the time.

I can see why this story continued for seven more sequels. There’s an energy here, and real passion you rarely see with low-budget horror films. No one involved phoned in a performance, and Elwes and Glover are in top-form, even if the former’s American accent does occasionally slip. The story, as silly as it may be at points, is never hard to follow, and every scene is shot with visual style and atmosphere. Say what you will about the sequels, but the original Saw is a certified classic.

Wednesday Review: The Conjuring 2

I’ve honestly never gotten James Wan’s popularity. I certainly don’t think he’s bad, but I feel as if he simply uses standard horror cliches somewhat better than more traditionally awful directors. Chris Stuckman has singled Wan out specifically for his tendency to makethe audience jump from loud noises only when those noises are causedby things the audience is actually supposed to be afraid of, as if this is some great innovation. He’s certainly never made anything as good as The Witch or It Follows, which makes me suspect that either audiences not familiar with such films are grading on a curve, or audiences prefer Wan’s easier-to-digest films over more challenging story-telling.

This isn’t helped by the fact that I’m not a huge fan of Ed and Lorraine Warren. Honestly, both in the film and in real-life, I find them to be self-righteous bores who believe that God personally chose them to fight the forces of evil. My dislike may be fueled by the fact that I identify as pagan, and thus find Catholicism in general to be somewhat stuck-up, but cards on the table, there you go.

That said, however, I do agree with critics who are saying that The Conjuring 2 is substantially better than the first film. For most of this movie the family being haunted are the primary characters, and Ed and Lorraine Warren don’t even come to England to investigate the haunting until an hour into the story (in real life they were barely involved in this case). I find the family to be far more relatable, and many of the supernatural events actually come across as scary.

The film also benefits from a more nuanced view of those investigating the haunting. While it’s pretty clear from the start there is something going on, the skeptics are treated with a great deal of respect, and many of their concerns about the case are acknowledged as valid. We never deal with anyone who is dead set on proving their view in the face of evidence.

This movie does, however, share one common problem with it’s predecessor: the climax. This is a problem that embodies why James Wan is not the best choice for Haunted House films. Wan is a director who tells complete stories. However, hauntings are scary precisely because of how much information we don’t have. As with the last movie, the film eventually turns into an action thriller, with the Warrens explaining everything that’s going on, and dispatching the evil forces. In real life the Enfield Poltergeist is famous because of just how mysterious and controversial the events are, so why would we want to know in such pain-staking detail what was happening?

That said, the film is better than Annabelle. I’d probably be giving it better marks if it hadn’t already gotten it’s happy ending from Rotten Tomatoes. It’s not bad, I like the non-Warren characters, and the first two acts are unsettling. The atmosphere is creepy, and the scares are done well. You could do a lot worse with your weekend viewings.