Deliver Us from Evil

When I was first starting this blog, I planned to review Deliver us from Evil between The Conjuring and Annabelle.  My reasoning was that the real-life Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana) worked heavily with the real-life Warrens, so I could kind of squint and pretend I have a trilogy.  However, now The Conjuring 2 is long out, and Annabelle 2 and The Nun are on the horizon (as of editing the former is out), so I’m still doing this because...meh, why not?
That said, this has fairly little to do with the real-life Ralph Sarchie as best I can tell from glancing over his Wikipedia page.  I imagine that if the man had murdered a suspect it would have been mentioned.  But, instead, Wikipedia tells me only that he was raised Catholic, his faith waned, and his faith was restored when he became a demonologist in addition to being a cop.

To deal with the actual movie, however, my feelings on it aren’t that different from my feelings on the original Conjuring.  I’ve said in the past that I don’t relate to movies about demons and the devil, because my beliefs do not include the concept of ultimate good or evil.  If a villain doesn’t have at least some selfish motivation, or a belief that their doing the right thing, then I just can’t relate.

That said, however, this movie lacks even the pretense of being well made or compelling.  We get a bunch of clichés thrown together in a movie that seems to have been shot without a lighting crew, because I can’t tell what’s going on half the time.

Officer Sarchie is a cop with a strained family life because of his work, and a lapsed Catholic dealing with the Problem of Evil.  However, a woman (Olivia Horton) at a zoo goes crazy and murders her own son.  Sarchie is told by the woman’s recovering addict Priest (Edgar Ramirez) that she’s possessed.  The two turn into an unlikely duo, hunting down a possessed marine (Sean Harris) who is turning people into murderers whenever they read ancient text.

Could they at least pretend to take “based on a true story” seriously?  If it was that easy to cause people to become possessed, teenagers would use it as a prank all the time.

Even the exorcism scene at the end gives us nothing new.  There’s no acknowledgement that Sarchie might have seen The Exorcist, or serious attempt to subvert the expectations of the audience.  Just “well, time for an exorcism scene.”

There’s a few creepy images from time to time, but for the most part it’s just a standard cop movie with a supernatural overtone.  People are chased, the exorcism happens in the interrogation room, bodies are found, etc.  Nothing to see here.

This is a bad movie.  The people involved all deserve better.  I’m among the few defenders of Eric Bana’s version of The Hulk, and I feel that he can really pull of great work.  But this is a project that no one cared about, and already I doubt anyone remembers.

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.

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.

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is a movie that couldn’t be made today. Nothing about it is calculated or planned, and often times the scenes don’t even seem to fit together. We go from outright spoof to feigned drama scene-to-scene. The actors often seem to think they’re in totally different movies.

That isn’t to bash our current crop of movies. I think the 2010s will be well-remembered for producing some truly great art. However, all of that art is very meticulous. Studios often know exactly what they’ll be making years in advance, and put all the necessary preparations. With films of the 80s, however, there’s a real sense that much of the plot was probably made up on the fly.

I’m not sure how much of it truly was, however, as the film was clearly fueled by the meta-joke that a horror host is suddenly stuck in the same kind of bad films she normally hosts. The style with which this comedy is delivered is a bit hard to explain. On the one hand, no one can claim that Cassandra Peterson is playing her role as Elvira straight. However, she also avoids the modern spoof tendency to wink too blatantly at the audience. This is a story that makes logical sense within an illogical universe.

Elvira, leaving her television series, needs money to finance her new Vegas show. At just the right time, she receives notice of an inheritance from an unknown aunt. Traveling to collect, Elvira finds herself in a puritanical town surrounded by Conservatives horrified by her manners of speech, dress, and behavior. Elvira, being herself, does nothing to alleviate their concerns, generally acting like some combination of a bratty child, and an obnoxious teenager.

The first half of the film is largely a comedy about the town, while the second turns into a supernatural story as Elvira discovers that her aunt was a witch, and the powers have passed onto her. It’s also worth noting that the backstory makes no sense, an aspect which I suspect was intentional. There are also plenty of scenes that just sort of happen, without advancing the plot at all.

The sexual politics are firmly rooted in the 80s, with parts of the movie dealing with Elvira as an object of teenaged fantasy. The other actors all seem to be generally aware that they’re in a comedy, but not one quite as blatant as the tone Elvira is going for, and this allows her to fully take center stage. If she has any competition at all it comes from her Great Uncle Vincent (W. Morgan Sheppard), who seems to be channeling the age of Universal Horror with his evil schemes to use their family’s magic to bring about the end of days. Daniel Greene gets his job done as the love interest, although Edie McClurge is a little too on-point as “Chastity Pariah,” the local leader who tries to turn the town against Elvira.

The last fifteen minutes or so somehow become even more insane that the rest of the film. Elvira not only gets magical powers, but a rocket launcher, to duke it out with her uncle. Somehow the movie maintains a dramatic level of tension in spite of this.

It isn’t easy to summarize this movie, because so many scenes are just a series of jokes. Suffice it to say, it’s worth checking out. Highly recommended for parents with kids who are just crossing the threshold into more mature content.