Reviews

I'm really scared of horror films and I hate watching them because the dumbest jumpscare can make me jump right out of my skin. My friends made me watch the remake of Suspiria last year and I watched the whole movie through my fingers.

So you can image that I wasn't too thrilled when my friend suggested watching Conjuring. That said, nothing in this film scared me. You know that anxious feeling when you're watching a horror film and the protagonist goes to open something or walks into a dark room and you're like "no don't do that" because you know that you'll be scared by whatever is in there. This movie sets up that scene like hundred times but nothing ever happens. So after some time you stop caring if there ever will be anything scary in the closet or the music box or the cellar or under the bed or any other cliche place. And nothing that happens later isn't scary enough to apologise for that.

The only scary thing about this movie is the horrible plot and even worse acting. I think that the dog was the only believable actor and he's the only one who managed to convey some sort of emotion on the screen.

The director decided to start the movie with a "creepy doll" (honestly it would be creepier if it was just a Barbie doll or something - I saw a different reviewer mentioning "uncanny". Most horror films are scary because of the uncanny - presenting something ordinary in an unfamiliar way so that it becomes creepy. There's nothing uncanny about a creepy looking doll acting all creepy, your brain just rationalises it) and the main characters proclaim that the doll isn't posessed by a ghost or whatever and is simply moved around by one to scare its victims. But they still take the doll to their "haunted collection" and later it is treated as it is posessed, so what's that about? Not to mention that the whole doll part of the script is incredibly redundant since it does nothing to further the plot or make a point.

I think that the movie would be much more interesting if it went the mystery route and the "demonologists" had to investigate why is the house haunted and by whom in order to get rid of the spirits. Instead we just get the whole boring explanation dumped on us in 2 seconds before we even get interested in it.

If I made this movie, the ghost victims of Bethesda (or whatever her name is) would be used as clues and their sudden appearances would give hints to the investigators. For example, the demonologists would HAVE to go to the creepy parts of the house in order to find them instead of just stumbling upon them by chance, like in the movie. They'd have to avoid the main evil spirit who wouldn't want the truth to come out. And the whole thing about the evil spirit being a witch who killed her child and didn't want to share her land? That has to be the dumbest plot point ever. We aren't even explained why is she so attached to her land. It would be better if investigators excorcised her spirit and the house remained haunted, which would lead them to find out that Bethesda wasn't the evil spirit but one of the victims. Maybe her husband killed her and the child but she was wrongfully accused because she practiced witchcraft or something. They would have to lure out his spirit and exorcise him. And the actors in my movie wouldn't be allowed to completely BUTCHER Latin language to the point that it sounds like Brad Pitt's "Bawngiorno" in Inglorious Basterds. Honestly, how hard is it to find some poor Latin professor to go over the script with actors?

All in all, even though I don't like horror movies, I rate them by the success of whatever they tried to accomplish. If I was rating success in Catholic propaganda and presenting a known couple of conmen as "based on real events" I would give it 10/10, but since it's marketed as a horror film and even *I* wasn't spooked, I gave it 3/10, but only because the dog did a good job.

So this movie starts with some quality atmosphere. A Leonard Cohen song. A private detective and a beautiful, yet mysterious woman sit in a fancy restaurant. The woman looks like a porn version of Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet. She flirts for fun or necessity and is out of his league by far. The woman is in love with an unknown man, a dangerous man. But she's not sure if she's the only woman in his life. So she hires the aforementioned private detective. However, it seems that this beautiful woman isn't very bright and refuses to give him anything but vague information about the man.

Of course, he starts following the wrong man. He is following Captain Stottlemeyer from Monk instead of Neil Young who decided to swap his style with Jim Jarmusch for this occasion.

Now the game begins. While our detective is following the wrong man, he is followed by another detective, Stella (who confusingly looks like a boring version of the mysterious woman), hired by his "it's complicated" girlfriend. And to top it all, there's also some hit-man looking dude watching them menacingly from afar.

This part is really boring. Our detective finds out that the wrong guy he's following leads a double life. He has two wives, two kids and is basically living the lives of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse respectively. The detective proceeds to tell Ms Dolan (the woman who hired him) all the spicy details on the wrong guy and apparently she doesn't know anything about the person she's so in love with that an image of her anime silver fox Neil Young leading a farmer's life doesn't seem suspicious at all.

Upon learning "truth" about her dear beloved 40 year old emo Neil Young, Ms Dolan wastes no time as she passionately falls in love with the detective, who promises to protect her. However, that doesn't happen as she suddenly disappears (that menacing hit-man dude finally played his long awaited role in the movie).

Now this is the part of the movie when you're sitting there thinking what the hell. Where is Neil Young already, who is the hit-man person, why do we know an excessive amount of detail about the guy that wasn't even supposed to be followed, when is this going to end and how can they save this mess? But they don't. They don't save the mess. Instead there's a sudden love story between Stella and the detective, and something like an 8 minute scene of him trying to talk her into having sex with him, which is, by the way, kind of creepy. They become partners in solving this mystery, but they *still* don't know that Mr Double Life isn't Ms Dolan's man. Their incompetent poking around this man's life causes it to shatter, and we see Stella driving his country wife somewhere, but of course that part of the plot is just forgotten later and never mentioned again.

Suddenly, just as we start forgetting about what was supposed to be the main plot of the movie (not because of director's artistic tendencies, but because it is really boring), the detective guy runs into Ms Dolan holding hands with her actual man. He finally (god bless) realizes that he's been following the wrong person. BUT poor Ms Dolan doesn't know what's in store for her. Neil Young has a completely unexplained plan to murder her, while his bodyguard is still staring menacingly downstairs. She is saved by the detective, Neil Young is left hanging from the balcony, he lets her romantic fantasies about him down, she catches a train and leaves the city, he finally has sex with Stella. The End.

To sum it all up, I wasn't really satisfied with this movie. I only gave it 5 stars because I was down with flu and the other movies that I watched that day were even worse (Autumn In New York, for example). It seemed like the director had a fun idea, a bit of noir, a bit of comedy and mystery, but in the end everything ended up being unfinished, unexplained or completely illogical. Some characters were painfully 2-dimensional, a lot of screen time went to character arcs and plots that were never finished (country wife and her lover, Neil Young and his plan to kill Ms Dolan, detective's girlfriend, to name just few) so I was left watching credits roll, feeling very disappointed. It would be an overstatement to say that the disappointment came from caring about the characters, because I only wished the worst to happen to all of them, but after spending 97 minutes (that felt like 297 minutes, let's blame it on the flu) I wanted to get some feeling of closure, at least.

I just watched this movie and could tell what would happen literally from the beginning. The plot has already been seen too many times and the title of the movie is basically the its summary. In the beginning of the movie we are shown a crime site where a young man has been killed and are introduced to 2 girls, Amy and Christine. The actress who portrayed Amy, the antagonist and the subject of the movie was obviously very convincing since you can immediately see that she is going to be the unwanted guest, even before she is even invited to stay at her friend's place. We follow an ugly but smart duckling who lets her hair out of a ponytail and becomes a sex bomb and gains confidence in a minute Amy through series of murders that, I guess, she had some reason for. Basically she is obsessed with Christine's stepfather, an average looking middle aged man (literally she could've found a better looking middle aged man in any bar ever) and tries to seduce him by preventing his wife and daughter from getting between them? How does she do that? Oh, by pushing his wife from a stool which results in her breaking a leg or something and later drugging her all the time, and leaving a window open so that the daughter gets sick (?). She then assumes the role of a housekeeper and a(n) (evil) nurse. However, the still-not-that-hot father is still not that into her (even thoufh they kiss once) because he, like, loves his wife. Of course, what feels like hundred years later than it was painfully obvious that there is something weird about this girl no one knows anything about and who likes to oddly stare at people with a creepy smile on her face, the mother finally realizes that it would probably be a good idea to, like, remove her from the house. However, when they try to do that she goes all nuts and tries to kill her friend. The friend is of course saved in the last minute when the mother injects something in Amy's neck (even though she was pretty drugged up and just broke her leg in two places, she heroically stood up from her bed, WALKED through the whole freaking huge house just in time to save her daughter. Ok.) The father and police come back at the same moment as Amy's dying and pathetically apologising to the love of her life, that average dumb dude. The worst part of the movie (maybe after the fact that every time Amy's obviously about to do something bad, very dramatic music plays for about a minute, just in case someone didn't realize that something's about to happen) is that, in the end, when she dies and everybody else doesn't, we expect to hear what's her reason behind, like, murdering and torturing random people. HOWEVER, we NEVER hear that because the police DOESN'T KNOW AND YES YOU JUST WATCHED A COMPLETELY POINTLESS MOVIE THAT WASN'T EVEN REMOTELY GOOD! YES!