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Quickie Review - Insidious

Insidious is not your typical modern day horror film.  There is almost no gore, no sexual situations and no bad language.  It has been dubbed one of the scariest movies of all-time by some, but I would debate that highly.  What it is, is a good movie for about an hour and twenty minutes.  The problem is that the movie is over an hour and forty minutes.

The movie is a traditional haunted house story, with a slight twist, it's not the house that is haunted.  Where the movie succeeds greatly is in building the tension, as the supernatural world and the natural world collide.  It does this almost as well as any movie I've seen.  The writers and director, James Wan of Saw fame, were obviously highly influenced with early 80's films Poltergeist and The Entity, starring Barbary Hershey who plays a major role in this film. Some might say it's a complete rip-off of The Entity, but we'll go with homage.  Psst!  The Entity is a far superior movie and is far more disturbing.

The real problem with Insidious was that in the last twenty minutes it tried to do two things.  One, was to explain absolutely everything that had happened and why and two, was to set up a sequel.  It accomplished the first at the sake of the tone of the movie and it accomplished the second, with a very poor ending that seemed almost an afterthought.  All in all it's worth a look, but don't expect to be happy at the end.  The let down ending was a real dud.  The ending could have been so much simpler and more effective I felt, had it gone in the obvious direction.

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