(JUAN.of.a.KIND)

Night #25:

Director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, the guys behind Saw, fooled me into thinking their latest horror suspense enterprise Insidious was going to be something special. The first third, maybe even the first half, is quite solid, the filmmakers presenting a suspenseful and scary haunted house thriller that had me legitimately intrigued and extremely interested to discover where it was going to go. While not all that far removed from Robert Wise’s The Haunting, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining or Oren Peli’s (who just so happens to be a producer here) Paranormal Activity that doesn’t make what’s going on any less entrancing or sinister, and for a while I was positive Wan and Whannell were finally going to live up to all their much ballyhooed potential.

But at a certain point the bottom falls out of this production, the filmmakers letting things get increasingly silly and ludicrous unleashing a final climactic flourish of lunacy and tedium that had me scratching my head as to what exactly just happened.

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The odd thing here is whether or not Wan and Whannell intend for the film to go completely off the deep end into straight silliness or whether they actually believe the second half twists and turns into the absurd increase the tensions deliciously crafted during the early portions. If it is the former, then it boggles my mind that they would purposely undermine both themselves and their picture in this fashion. If it is the latter, then I’m flabbergasted that they didn’t notice how wrong a direction they were starting to take things in. Either way, Insidious comes apart at the seams in a way that is both fascinating and annoying, a potentially great movie becoming nothing less than a minor disaster right before my very eyes.

But boy do I love that first half or so. From sound design to editing, cinematography to music, everything works together stupendously. The preview audience I saw it with was shrieking in delightful terror, and even the obviously John Carpenter inspired jump scares managed to jolt me upright and send shivers down my spine even though the majority of the time I saw them coming from a mile away. There’s some delicious stuff going on, and it goes without saying that by the time Dalton fell into his coma I was sitting at the edge of my seat, making the ridiculous monotony of what was to come all the more disheartening.

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If only the movie didn’t devolve so far into camp with such thunderously deliberate speed. From gothic dolls to a clownish old crone to a James Dean wannabe with bad teeth and a lizard-like tongue, many of the images that end up getting presented are beyond comical. The whole final sequence is a comedy of errors devoid of tension, leading up to a climactic kicker that’s as forgone as it is preposterous. Someday Wan and Whannell might make a horror film I can get excited about, but until then Insidious is just another baleful reminder of wasted opportunities and potential unfulfilled.

(The Film Palace)