It’s January and that brings the finest of Hollywood traditions: a shitty horror movie to start the year. Just like Oscar bait movies in December and Michael Bay movies in the summer, early January has its own slice of bullshit that runs like clockwork. Last year brought us The Bye Bye Man, in 2016 it was The Forest, in 2015 it was The Woman in Black 2, in 2014 it was Paranormal Activity 5, and so forth back to the dawn of time. This year, I thought that there was a chance that this chain might be broken. While I don’t particularly like the Insidious films, they aren’t terrible either. But Hollywood stuck to its traditions and delivered. Insidious: The Last Key is easily the worst in the series.
This is a sequel to Insidious Chapter 3 and a prequel to the first Insidious, because fuck knows I’ve been up at night wondering what happened between those two movies. Our demon-hunting hero Elise (still played by the awesome Lin Shaye) has received a call to investigate a case in the house that she grew up in. So she travels to her childhood home, there is a demon there, she battles it, blah blah. It’s basically the same plot as the other movies. What’s a bit odd here, and what does make it stand out from the other movies, is that this movie is surprisingly unpleasant. The other Insidious films largely stuck to jump-scare ghost shenanigans, but this one incorporates child abuse, kidnapping and implied torture and sexual abuse. It’s just fucking off, like an Insidious movie crossed over with a depressing episode of CSI. So if you like your shitty CGI and jump scares with a side of child beating, this is your lucky day.
Speaking of the demon and the traditional Insidious stuff, herein lies the major problem. This movie is fucking boring. It goes very long stretches without the demon at all and he doesn’t do much when he is on screen. I went to the bathroom at one point and asked my friend if anything had happened while I was gone. He responded in the negative and then he nodded off about ten minutes later. It takes fucking forever to get to the majority of the actual horror elements in this horror film and it is pretty damn anticlimactic when we get there. I didn’t care by that point.
This is an odd series in terms of both chronology and focus. As I alluded to earlier, the story-order of the films is 3-4-1-2. I suppose that’s largely because the series stupidly killed off Elise in part 2, then the producers realized that she was the most popular character. Which brings us to the other problem: The characters and focus of the first two films is gone and the series has shifted to a Scooby Doo format with Elise and her pals traveling around in their mystery machine (complete with ghosts painted on it) looking for mysteries to solve. It doesn’t even feel like the same series as it did in the beginning. It’s interesting to have a horror series that focuses on the hero as the main character (the only other such example that I can think of is Evil Dead), but these movies weren’t that interesting to begin with and there is a sad sense of sameness that has crept in. Much like every episode of Scooby Doo, we know how these are going to go. Elise gets a call, she is skeptical about taking the case, a bunch of jump scares ensue and she wins because of the power of good or some shit. It’s a formula and it’s a goddamn boring one. I haven’t commented on any of the new characters because I barely remember them.
This movie clearly leads into the first movie, so I don’t know where they go from here. Maybe they will make a sequel to the second movie. Then the story-order will be 3-4-1-2-5, because fuck it. I’m over it at this point, though, don’t worry, I’ll keep seeing them because I’m a fucking idiot. I even enjoyed The Bye Bye Man better than this because at least that movie was funny. This was just a lot of nothing.
Looking ahead on the release schedule, I can see that the beginning of next January brings us a horror movie called Eli. I don’t know what that’s about, but want to place bets now that its going to fucking suck? Stay tuned.
Image By: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/34/InsidiousTheLastKey.jpg
