But they fail to deliver bargain-basement cheap thrills. Wan and the Hayes want their film to be judged as a theme park attraction. The fact that so many pseudo-spooky scenes in "The Conjuring" involve jump scares is telling. But that kind of bait-and-switch tactic is just annoying in a horror film whose monsters are only as scary as they are fitfully unnerving.
#ELVIS EBERT MOVIE#
This is a movie where two characters, after experiencing a major traumatic event, express affection for each other by saying, "You did good," and, "No, you did." Hokey period details, like Wilson's Elvis-like flip haircut and sideburns, or Farmiga's Liberace-style collar ruffles, are meant to lull viewers into complacency.
But it takes a special kind of rocket scientist to enter a room after seeing a ghost with slit wrists whisper (loudly), "Look what she made me do," then disappear around a corner. One might argue that there wouldn't be much of a movie if characters didn't make stupid decisions. But a key reason that the film's barrage of jump scares is as dissatisfying as it is is because the Hayes' scenario is distressingly light on intelligent characterizations, memorable dialogue, logic. The Perrons' house needs cleaning up: "Whoa! That's gonna take a lot of elbow grease!" The Warrens are God-fearing, and happily married: "You said that God brought us together for a reason." And while there are three stages to a haunting ("Infestation, Oppression, Possession"), the Perrons' new house isn't haunted-they are ("It's like stepping on gum: sometimes you take it with you").ĭon't let the Hayes' diarrhetic explanations put you off: you can ignore much of what's being said and understand "The Conjuring" just fine. The girls are rambunctious, and miss their old home: "Well, first cute boy she meets, she'll forget about Jersey." We learn something new about the Perrons and the Warrens in every other scene because they never stop describing themselves to each other. That kind of incessant throat-clearing continues after we're introduced to the Perrons, a family with five young daughters who just moved into a big house on the edge of a small Massachusetts town. And if you don't believe the filmmakers, too bad, braaaahm, here's the movie's title in huge, bigger-than-Kubrick yellow font don't choke on it. This movie is set in the early '70s, is "based on the true story," and follows the most serious exorcism case in the Warrens' history.
Finally, a ream of text assaults your eyeballs with even more useless information. It's never explicitly explained in the film, but in real life, the Warrens "investigated" the Amityville Horror hoax. Next, Ed and Lorraine Warren ( Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) explain to a rapt collegiate audience that they're demonologists who specialize in exorcisms. In fact, the Hayes' brothers are so anxious to explain their "Amityville Horror"-knockoff's convoluted backstory that they dump information in viewers' laps three different ways before the film's opening credits.įirst, there's a dramatization of the 1968 Annabelle Higgins case, a real-life "haunting" that apparently involved a creepy doll, and two dimwitted nubile nurses.
The film's plot is explained exhaustively whenever loud noises aren't blaring, and random objects aren't teasingly leaping out at you from the corner of your eye. "The Conjuring" is as toothless as it is because it's two different kinds of boring.
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