The Kids are Haunted

Title:  Insidious

Actors/Director/Anything Worth Mentioning Right Away:  James wan, Lyn Shaye, the list goes on.

Introduction:  I got this from the library for free.

Location:  Mostly within two different houses.

Plot:   When a young boy slips into a coma, the mother begins to think the house is possessed.   When they move houses, she still feels haunted.   Eventually, she is told that it is not the house that is haunted but her son.   Whoa.   If my kid was haunted, I’d sell him on eBay (No refunds/No returns).  But they keep going forward and call in what are kind of like Ghost Hunters.   They explain things that are complex but I fully believe in.  I do believe this movie could be real, which makes it more frightening in a way.   Ultimately, this movie feels like Paranormal Activity only with a plot.  It’s really a suspenseful tale and one of the best I’ve seen in a very long time.

Acting:  Obviously this movie is full of top notch actors, but I must tip my hat to the lovely Lyn Shaye who is always amazing in her roles.   This seems like a fairly big role for her and she does not disappoint.

Production:  This was a big budget movie, in the sense that it had a big theater release and all, but it actually didn’t have a huge budget like most movies do.   You think they’d have Saw money, but you’d be wrong.   This movie is, however, the most profitable movie of all of 2011 so far, meaning it cost the least to make and has made the most money.

Sex/Nudity:  Ehh…. Not so much.

Special Effects:   They are AWESOME.

Overall Verdict:  I’ve been taking a lot of issue with movie logic lately (I know, I know, suspension of disbelief), and there is one thing that bugs me about this movie.   When Lin Shaye’s character enters, she’s seen as kind of this crazy person who they don’t want to believe and thus they kind of write her off.   They only bring her back because the father character ends up going into his son’s room and finding a drawing that his son made of the devil-like creature as described by Shaye’s character.   The father character used that to justify bringing her services back, but from my skeptical eye I wondered why he didn’t just think that maybe Shaye’s character also saw that drawing and made her description based on it.   I guess that’s just the way that my mind works, though it is kind of explained later on anyway when we also learn that the father is a traveler.    It also needs to be said that while in the library recently, I overheard two girls in matching purple shirts talking about this movie.   Sure, they may have made fun of Tora Tora Tora first, but then the one girl pointed out that this was one of the best horror movies she had seen in a while.   She then went on to add her own critique that she felt like it could have had a happy ending and remained a horror movie.   Though we were in the library (and supposed to be quiet), I would have told her that Wes Craven himself wanted a happy ending for the original NOES and had that happened, well, we might not have had the franchise that we do today.   That’s just one example.