I’m surprised to find no thread on this and a search turns up no mentions. Rotten Tomatoes is 85%, really high for a haunted house movie which are usually pretty tepid affairs. Trailer looks pretty creepy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb-jRz7HWqs
I was gonna go tonight. Anyone in QT3-land seen it?
Someone must’ve. It blew out the box office this past weekend.
Yes. We talked a bit about why it scored so high. Basically, it’s because it’s so competent. Entirely derivative, but very well done.
-Tom
Made sure we got in a crowded theater on a Friday night to see it. The crowd is half the entertainment.
There could have been more humor with the fact that the timeframe was 70’s decade, but it was enjoyable. Certainly not the scariest thing, but fun nevertheless.
A friend of mine said he saw it the other night and two really annoying teenage girls ran out screaming in the middle of it and never returned.
I saw it last night. It hits every single haunted house movie beat you expect it to. Like Tom said, though, it’s so thoroughgoingly competent that you have to be impressed given the sorry state of most horror movies. Also there’s a couple of very tense sequences. Some really solid performances too, especially Lili Taylor (who doesn’t get enough roles these days) and Vera Farmiga. It’s almost worth it just for the costuming, which really gives the movie a sense of place.
Overall, a solid B+.
Don’t forget the sideburns! Come for the things that go bump in the night, stay for the sideburns. And the cars. I loved Officer Brad’s Bradmobile.
-TomThis is a really good horror movie. I got chills, CHILLS, in a couple of scenes. Not jump scares but actual chills running up and down my spine.
This movie does with horror tropes what I think Pacific Rim was trying for with the giant creature genre. Take a bunch of standard, familiar ingredients and make something memorable out of it. I mean, how frickin’ played out is that ‘seeing something behind you in a mirror’ gag? And yet in this movie it never failed to creep me out. How played out is the creepy doll thing? Not as played out as I thought. The other thing is the cast, and the characters they play, make a big difference. Unlike a lesser movie, like Pacific Rim, no one in this movie is a jerk or in any way trying to be an obstacle to others. In this movie people are trying to do their best and help each other and it doesn’t reduce the dramatic tension one bit. How cool is that?
If they do a series about the characters Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga play, I’m in the audience no question. Those two work very well together.
Totally agree with you. Even though many of the scares were rote and very cliche, I think the reason why you buy into them, is that you sympathize with all the characters because they are so damn easy to like. Not one character in this movie is “The Jerk” as you see in so many movies of this type.
There is reportedly a sequel of some kind in the works.
Too bad the people they are actually based on (who came up with The Amityville Horror, among other things) are notorious shysters at best.
— Alan
Movies like “The Conjuring” are cinematic comfort food. You go in knowing exactly what to expect from an ol’-fashioned haunted-house film; and you enjoy it because it assembles its all-too-familiar ingredients so well. Heck, it’s practically a retread of the director’s last film, but with a `71 paint job, and it’s still satisfying.
I agree, unbongwah, but the difference between The Conjuring and other horror movie comfort food (Insidious, Sinister, the latest Paranormal Activities, that exorcism movie with the creepy nun on the poster) is that The Conjuring is really really competent. In other words, it’s far better than most horror movies bother to be. For that reason alone, I wouldn’t lump it in with those other comfort food horror movies. It’s way more satisfying than those.
As for a movie series about the Warrens, there’s really no reason to bother with their actual names. Maybe they have a following of Art Bell wackos or something. But otherwise you can just invent a husband-and-wife ghost hunter team without losing anything meaningful. Unless you want to do a story about shysters who stumble onto something real. In which case, The Last Exorcism is probably better than anyone would do with a story about the real life Warrens.
-TomI enjoyed the lack of outsized personalities and axe grinding. I was slightly unsettled by the lack of swearing. At certain points I can conceive of no earthly reason why the characters would not be yelling the purest of freeform profanity. I further enjoyed the movie because of the Warrens, because I did know of their history in finding the practice of Satanism to be widespread. I think that accusations of Satanism were all too common in the 1970s and 1980s, as anyone who listens to music with guitars or plays games with dice who was alive at the time can probably agree. That being said, I find the worldview that prompts those allegations, and investigations, and even false prosecutions like those associated with Satanic Ritual Abuse, for example, to be fascinating and a ripe topic for films of every genre.
Full disclosure, I got in trouble during the film for giggling because I, for a moment, invited in the devil that was pretending the movie was actually an after school special on the dangers of PCP.
I look at it in terms of hamburgers (no, seriously). At the bottom of the scale, you’ve got your Mickey Ds. Move up a notch, you get your Wendys & BKs. Up another notch or two, you’ve got Five Guys and In `n Out. Up & up the burger ladder you go, until you get to the $20+ gourmet burgers at trendy hotspots with, like, truffle oil and unicorn tears. But in the end, they’re all still burgers; what changes is the ingredients used and the skill of preparation.
Not sure exactly where the Conjuring belongs, but it’s definitely on their higher end of the Comfort Burger Scale. :)
This one looks to be making some time for I guess. I havent been to the theater in forever though.
So there are THREE spin-off movies planned apparently, and a sequel.
— Alan
Looks good. James Wan is putting together a pretty solid CV as a director.
One thing I love about James Wan films is the sheer amount of texture they have. Yes, this sounds weird. Pay attention to surfaces in his films. There’s this incredibly busy, textured, bumpy feeling all of his films have that I just dig. He uses textured wallpaper in movies, bumpy (wood grain) furniture, etc. And it’s definitely him - I’ve seen it in all of his films, and as an example, that kind of feeling and attention to lighting response and surfacing is completely missing from the Saw sequels.
Yes, it’s a weird thing to notice maybe. But there it is.