Review of Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015) by Mpbeb — 19 Jun 2015

Diminishing returns on a franchise abandoned to whatever soundtrack scares go bump in the night and a premise wearing thin through each successive iteration. After the transgender hate crime of chapter 2, Insidious returns with a prequel that shifts our attention to another imperiled family.

Though the entire film focuses on a convoluted teenage girl prone to occult spirituality as she mourns the passing of her mother and attempts to contact her spirit. Instead of slowly developing the web of relationships and anxieties between this new family we focus on the barely present stereotypical outlines of her perpetually distracted and stressed out working father and the pest younger sibling.

Quinn becomes a quasi-maternal center in a family that resents or ignores her coercing her to seek the ideal dead mother who is defined by an interest in vinyl records and the adulation of her daughter (but nothing else).

When Quinn calls out to one dead person, one with a more Insidious purpose responds. Sadly the presence of this "parasite" or "demon" or geriatric ghost in a hospital gown and oxygen mask is far from frightening unless the grim specter of aging is the greatest fear our generation possesses.

Watching all three movies makes me question what laws govern "the further" (time is not linear as we saw in Chapter 2) there are malevolent spirits, demons and haunted places defined by trauma or violence (but was the red-faced demon in the first movie in the attic of the old house because of the murder that continued to haunt the house in the other realm or was the demon responsible for instigating that uncanny act, just like was the house of the Black Bride near Josh's childhood bedroom because of a connection made when he witnessed the death of the castrated old man?) I realize a supernatural horror film using astral projection as a plot point does not need to conform to logic, but the films are content with telling us a story we already know (like how Chapter 2 combines every gender confused serial killer from Silence of the Lambs to Psycho except with a domineering ghost mother that dresses like a Victorian Vampire and has a vicious right hook).

This movie uniquely offers insight into the antagonistic relationship between the murderous Black Bride and psychic Elise and also fabricates a tragic background story about a spouses suicide, it also explains how she teamed up with the technologically savvy ghost hunters who added comic relief to the first Insidious though were less interesting in the second and were ultimately con artists relying on blogs and computer editing to establish a cult reputation as ghost chasers in Chapter 3.

So if you are prone to jumping at loud sounds, are afraid of the elderly, find mysterious black footprints that climb the walls unnerving and have spared yourself from seeing the trailer in order to be genuinely startled by the limited soundtrack manipulation of this movie it is well within your rights to see it in the theaters.

For those who are more reluctant to part with hard earned money, it will probably be on Netflix in a matter of months.