The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D+
My regular readers, if I may assume for a moment that such people exist, know that I am not a big fan of this franchise. While the two proper The Conjuring entries are better than the spinoffs, I find all of them to be boring and overly reliant on cheap jump scares. However, after seeing The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, I feel like I owe an apology to the first two movies. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is a painfully, maddeningly dull film that doesn’t even deliver on the “boo” scares of its predecessors. In retrospect, the first two aren’t all that bad.
Again based on one of the “true” case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren (again played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), this film revolves around the murder trial of Arne Cheyenne Johnson in Connecticut in 1981. Arne was the first (and only?) person to ever attempt to use demonic possession as a defense in court. That much is true. However, in reality the judge refused to allow the defense (presumably because it’s fucking ridiculous) and the rest of the film is a true story in the same sense that Friday the 13th is a true story because camps exist. I rarely get annoyed by “true story” claims, but it’s important to remember that this dude really did murder somebody and this film gives him a fake sympathetic defense for doing it. That’s not cool.
Questionable ethics aside, I was actually happy that this movie was moving away from the haunted houses of the previous entries and moving into a slightly different direction. That sentiment was misguided, as this is one of the lamest possession movies I’ve ever seen. The film opens with an exorcism (including a cringy homage to The Exorcist) of a young boy at the hands of the Warrens. At the end of the demon-expulsion, the evil spirit jumps into Arne. Some time later, Arne commits the real-life murder, is sent to jail and the Warrens are left to figure out the source and motivations of the demon.
At this point, the real-life killer is sidelined for the rest of the film and we are left with a lame police procedural with the Warrens that feels more like a shitty episode of The X-Files than a Conjuring movie. While there is a demon in the film, the real villain is a Satanist (or witch or whatever) that is conjuring the demon and targeting victims by planting occult totems near them to summon the demon. She’s presumably doing this for reasons, which escaped me, but is human (well, sometimes she briefly has supernatural powers when the script needs it). This is a departure for the series and quite a disappointing one. The villain only has a couple of lines, has zero personality and isn’t memorable or frightening in the slightest. I’m not faulting the actress, but rather that the film gives her so little to do. The actual demon is given almost zero screen time and is an apparent afterthought in a film of afterthoughts. As much as I dislike the previous films, they usually delivered a villain or two that worked on a basic aesthetic level, be it Annabelle, the nun or the crooked man. This film delivers nothing to that pantheon.
As much as the first two Conjuring movies aren’t my cup of tea, director James Wan did deliver solid, almost gothic, atmosphere that harkened back to haunted house films of the 60s and 70s. Wan is replaced on this entry by director Michael Chaves (who made his directorial debut with the previous godawful Conjuring universe entry The Curse of La Llorona) and Chaves doesn’t quite have the same sensibility. Any sense of eeriness or dread that permeated the previous entries is replaced with an atmosphere that feels like a crossover between Ghost Hunters and C.S.I. and somehow manages to be more mundane than that sounds. There is nothing to see here in terms of horror, even the series’ trademark jump scares are largely missing, and the film’s R-rating is a complete mystery to me. The film’s one trick is to pay homage to far better films (specifically The Exorcist, The Exorcist III, The Shining and Amityville II) but without including any of the elements that made those films entertaining or frightening. I was literally checking my watch every five minutes in the second half of this movie and the Film Nurse seemed to share that sentiment with her frequent cries of “Jesus Christ, just fucking end!” as the film stretched on in an interminable void of boredom.
The only saving grace here is the return of Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, who have somehow taken real-life charlatans and turned them into the emotional bedrock of this franchise. Even with painfully cheesy flashback sequences and the fact that Farmiga has gone from have psychic tendencies to basically being Professor X in this installment, these two still mange to deliver performances beyond what this film (or this series, honestly) deserves and their chemistry almost makes parts of this movie watchable. Almost.
While I don’t like the prior two entries, I can understand why people enjoy them. I’m not extending that line of credit to this film. This is mind-numbingly boring filmmaking and this series is officially coasting on its brand at this point. The Warrens do have a werewolf tale among their cases (I mean, naturally, since they are true stories) and I’m hoping that will be the basis of the eventual The Conjuring 4. At least that would be something different and will make me wish I was watching The Howling or An American Werewolf in London instead.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conjuring%3A_The_Devil_Made_Me_Do_It#/media/File:The_Conjuring_-_The_Devil_Made_Me_Do_It.png
