“They’re here…again.”
In
this update, all the characters names have been changed to protect the
original. Gone is the fun-loving Freeling family of the 1982 film, now
we have the Bowens, a group of dysfunctional idiots who just happen to
land a rather unscrupulous realtor who leaves out the fact that their
house is built on an old cemetery. First we have Eric Bowen (Sam Rockwell) whose recently lost his job, then there is Amy (Rosemarie DeWitt) his stay at home wife and struggling author, followed by their oldest daughter Kendra (Saxon Sharbino) who is your stereotypical teen girl who hates where the family is forced to move, then there is Griffin (Kyle Catlett) their son who is afraid of everything, and last but surely not least is Maddie (Kennedi Clements) who talks to imaginary friends.
With that family who can blame her.
I’ll
try not to draw too many comparisons between this film and the
original, and aside from the few things dropped in as if from a remake
checklist there isn’t a lot that is similar, but the biggest change is
having the family just moving into the house. In the original film the
Freeling family had lived in the suburban housing development of Cuesta
Verde for quite some time, the dad was a successful realtor with an
honest to goodness happy family life, so when things start to go wrong
we actually care about what is happening. The remake has more in common
with the 2013 The Conjuring as they both deal with a
financially struggling family moving into a new home that unfortunately
turns out to be haunted. But once again The Conjuring
worked because you liked that family while the Bowens, as a whole, are
so annoying I’d have tossed them into a supernatural portal myself given
half the chance.
“Who you gonna call….not these guys.”
At
ninety-three minutes the film has no time to waste to get to the “good
stuff” as almost immediately little Maddie is talking to invisible
friends, the closet is revealed to be electrically charged, and comic
books magically stack themselves. Like many crappy films of this genre
the adults are completely oblivious to the strange goings on, and
whenever Griffin tries to explain what he’s seen the parents ignore him.
This horrible trope is always painful to watch, and worse here because
the original beautifully jettisoned that bit of stupidity by having the
mom witness the weirdness from the get-go.
“No human being could stack books like this.”
Director Gil Kenan,
assuming his audience is about to get up and leave, then throws the
film into overdrive. While the parents are out at a dinner party the
house goes into complete horror attack mode; Griffin is jumped by an
evil clown doll, Kendra is attacked by a corpse that bubbles up out of
the floor in the basement, and then Griffin is yanked out of the house
by an evil CGI tree. The director basically grabbed cool elements from
the original film and then crammed them altogether at the thirty minute
mark, with barely the briefest of set-ups.
And then Maddie’s bedroom is visited by the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Meanwhile
at the dinner party, with characters we have not seen nor will ever see
again, Eric and Amy find out about their post-cemetery neighbourhood
and it’s treated like a funny anecdote that everyone knew about, that is
everyone but these two suckers. When Eric and Amy arrive home they are
startled to see their son being thrashed about by the Whomping Willow
from Harry Potter. The tree lets Griffin go because…its
bark is worse than its bite? And they race inside to find a traumatized
Kendra and a missing Maddie. After a quick search of the house they
discover that their daughter is somehow stuck in the television set.
That’s what you get for only buying basic cable.
This movie rockets along with pretty much no character development or plot, it could have been called “Loud Noises: The Movie”
for all the thought that went into this script. Things get worse when
the paranormal investigators arrive whose sole purpose seems to be
informing us on house’s motivations, and it’s clear the only way they
could have come by this information is by reading the script. There is a
ridiculously stupid moment when one of the investigators asks Griffin
if his unemployed dad isn’t making all this up to get a reality show,
this after he saw a chair fly through the air and shatter against a
wall. Eventually they have to bring in the big guns and they call in
professional ghost hunter Carrigan Burke played by the awesome Jared Harris, but who was apparently told to do Father Merrin from The Exorcist by way of Quint in Jaws.
“We need a bigger crucifix.”
The
cast is uniformly awful, even actors such as Sam Rockwell and Jared
Harris who have done stellar work in genre films in the past are clearly
phoning it in here, and the effects are even worse. In the original
film the production crew used real human skeletons to save a buck, but
for the remake we get bargain basement CGI. I’m not saying filmmakers
should rob graves to get an authentic look but computer graphics from
your old Commodore 64 is not a proper alternative.
Effects shots possibly borrowed from the 2005 Constantine flick.
There
were a couple of effectively creepy moments in this film, but not
enough to make it worth your while. This looks to be one of those films
that was assembled by committee, processed like fast food, and then
released with the hopes of catching a little nostalgia boost from the
original. So in conclusion this film was neither scary, contained a cast
of unlikable characters, and should be avoided at all costs.
I do look forward to that clown doll teaming up with Annabelle.
Stray Thoughts:
• Who buys a house after getting laid off?
• Griffin finds a human bone while digging in the yard. So people here were buried without coffins?
• Whenever an adult experiences a paranormal terror event they keep it to themselves, even though they are trying to figure out what’s going on and shared information may be a good idea.
• Griffin finds a hidden closet full of creepy clown dolls. We never find out why they were there or who owned them, all we get is “People collect weird stuff” from the dad as an explanation.
• Trees smashing through windows and hauling out a screaming kid does not attract attention from the neighbours.
• The house exploding in a column of light, as if someone opened the Ark of the Covenant, also brings no notice from the neighbours.
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