Insidious

Directed By: James Wan
Written By: Leigh Whannell
Starring: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Lin Shayne, Barbara Hershey & Ty Simpkins
Rated: PG-13

MY RATING: C-

This is the story of a family of five who move into a new house where mysterious things start happening.  Wife and mom Renai (Rose Byrne) starts to hear strange noises and notice things being moved around in the house.  But the strangest event happens to the family's son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) when he falls into a coma that no doctors can explain or understand.  After this horrible event the family's luck gets worse.  Renai (Byrne) sees people in their house and her husband Josh (Patrick Wilson) starts to stray from their home and all of the turmoil inside it.  They decide to seek help and uncover more than they ever bargained for.  Secrets are unlocked along with the key to saving their son.

Now this film had a strong start for me.  I was definitely in suspense when the mom (Byrne) would hear strange sounds and go to investigate dark, quiet rooms.  I was intrigued by what happened to the oldest child Dalton (Simpkins) and drawn into the dad's (Wilson) internal conflict.  Sometimes what you don't see is truly scarier than what is actually there.  Once we get to the second half of the movie and the plot is revealed more that's when the film started going downhill for me.  It turned into a poor, poor knockoff of Poltergeist.  The old paranormal expert Elise Reiner (Lin Shaye) who comes to save the family was disappointing and just weird.  I did not enjoy her character at all.  But the most disappointing things for me were the ghosts.  When I see a movie like this I want to be scared or at least haunted and I felt nothing.  I actually found all of the spirits to be silly and ridiculous and the script really fell apart for me at the end.  The father (Wilson) travels to an alternate realm called The Further to rescue his son Dalton (Simpkins).  Elise (Shaye) paints a picture of The Further as a place to be feared but I found it to just be strange and disappointing.  There was too much build-up and a lot of let down.  This part of the film didn't even hold my interest all the way through.  I figured out the resolution so I was just anticipating the end already.  Also there's supposed to be this big surprise element that you'll never guess and leave the film talking about ... I was talking about it all right, talking about how silly it was. 

The only reason this film wasn't all bad for me is because of the first half of it, that was really good but the rest was not scary at all. 

So I'd say you can check this out on t.v. around Halloween time if it's in the middle of some kind of marathon.