Also, my anniversary-themed articles about my favorite rising stars and the like got pushed back indefinitely when I started my new column, Wayback Wednesday, so hang in there, I'll have those soon. One of them is almost done, in fact.
Those types of info-and-picture-heavy articles take even longer than the others, so bear with me. I don't get paid for this- yet- so I do what I can to manage time, but I don't always have it to spare. TIA for your understanding! 😊
As with the last entry in the Insidious series, I opted to not go see this one in the theaters. It takes a lot to get me into movie theaters these days, TBH. Not that I don't love it, but I don't get paid for it anymore, and there's such a wealth of entertainment at home already that I'd prefer to watch instead, so it's hard to justify spending all that money for something I can do cheaper at home.
Also, I was a bit underwhelmed by the last film in the franchise, so I didn't have much hope this one would be any better, even with the potential of this being the final one. Of course, as a longtime horror fan, I've heard that one before. It's only the last one if it under-performs at the box office, right? Witness Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, etc.
Given that this entry, Insidious: The Last Key, remarkably enough, was the highest-grossing in the franchise, grossing $167 million worldwide, I'm not holding my breath that we've seen the last of Elise and her ghost-hunting pals.
Furthermore, even though there's a full-circle element to this chapter, it still leaves a lot of wiggle room for another entry. After all, the entire movie takes place before the first two in the franchise, so we still don't know what happens after Chapter Two, i.e. the case about the girl in the coma, Allison, that serves as the ending of the film, aka the first one Elise's ghost hunters tackle ostensibly on their own. (Although Elise's spirit is still on hand to help, as we see at the end of that film.)
That said, this film does go a long way towards filling in a lot of the blanks, in terms of how Elise (the indispensable Lin Shaye) first learned she had the "gift." We also get a glimpse of Elise's troubled childhood, with the place she grew up serving as the setting for much of the film as well.
I appreciated all of that, and I thought the approach was much more effective than the last film, in which Elise was side-lined for much of the film until around the halfway mark. Here, she's front and center, as it should be, with the trusty Specs (Leigh Wannell, who also wrote this and the previous installments) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) in tow.
I also appreciated the familial connection of the case at hand, which involves her brother, Christian (Bruce Davidson, the OG Willard, X-Men), and his kids, Imogen (Caitlin Gerard, The Awakening, Smiley) and Melissa (Spencer Locke, "K-Mart" in the Resident Evil series).
It seems that the "gift" Elise has tends to skip a generation, as her brother doesn't have it- but one of his daughters, Imogen, does. How much you want to bet that, in the next one, the ghost hunters look up Imogen to help them when things get too hairy for them to handle it on their own? And that it's that first case we see at the end of the second film, involving the girl in a coma, Allison?
Anyway, the movie begins back in 1953, in New Mexico, where we meet the elder Rainers. There's mama Audrey (Tessa Ferrer, Extant, Grey's Anatomy), who knows her daughter has the "gift," as it runs in the family. So, she believes her when little Elise (Ava Kolker, American Horror Story) says she can see the ghosts of the executed prisoners at a nearby prison, where her husband, Gerald (Josh Stewart, The Collector series) works.
However, Gerald, an alcoholic who gets mean when he drinks, scoffs at the obvious spectral goings-on, even when a ghost starts actively messing with them- instead blaming the actions on Elise herself. One particularly bad night, Gerald beats Elise and locks her in the basement for punishment- and we all know bad things happen in the basement in horror movies.
In this case, a creepy voice calls out from behind a door, beckoning Elise to unlock it and let it in. She does. Bad move. The ghost promptly kills off mom when she comes to visit Elise and see how she's doing, hanging her from the ceiling. Gerald hears the ruckus and investigates, blaming Elise for his wife's death as well.
Not long after that, Elise runs away as a teenager, leaving her brother Christian to fend for himself from his father and the ghosts. This does not do much to endear him to his sister in the future, and the two become estranged, which I assume is why we're just now hearing about him- or what the writer wants you to think, anyway. (Ah, the good old ret-con!)
Flash-forward a few decades, and a now-grown-up, elderly Elise, hot off the case with Quinn Brenner (Stefanie Scott), from the last movie, gets a call from Ted Garza (Kirk Acevedo, Fringe), asking her help with a pesky ghost. All's well until he tells her his location and address: Five Keys, New Mexico- at her old address.
Despite her hesitation, she comes to Ted's aid, eventually running into her brother, who unhesitatingly tells her to stay away from him and his family. You'd think he would have moved away by now, but I digress... the writer's shenanigans continue, obviously.
She does, but naturally, events conspire to make it happen anyway, notably his non-gifted daughter, Melissa, going into a (ghost-related) coma. Together, with an assist from the gifted Imogen, Elise and her mighty ghost hunters seek to clean out her old family home for good and save Melissa from the ghostly embrace of the latest spook at hand.
Needless to say, there are complications along the way, or we wouldn't have much of a movie. Unlike the last film, which was only tangentially connected to the other two, this one refers both back to the Quinn Brenner case and the Lambert one from the first two films.
In fact, it serves as a direct conduit from the last film to the first two and does so in a clever way that is much more effective than the last one, complete with cameos from those films' respective casts.
As such, I couldn't help but like this one more, even if there's a lot of convenient plot mechanization going on. You'd expect anything less from the writer/creator of the never-ending Saw franchise? On the plus side, this entry is nowhere near as ludicrous as those films got, thank God.
That said, though it is a marked improvement over the last one, it's still nowhere near as good as the first two. Though I suspect they will all play together better watched in roughly chronological order (3,4,1, then 2), it still doesn't change the fact that the door is clearly- and literally, in this case- left open for more.
Even so, the film has its moments. I dug the prologue, with a young Elise, who still doesn't know enough not to mess with the Dark Side, thus accidentally and unwittingly setting up the course of her entire life. And the twists were pretty cool, dovetailing with the previous events of the other films in way the series hasn't since the second installment.
In other words, this is an altogether better sequel than the last one, with a better cast, plotting, and overall scares on the whole. As such, if you were disappointed with Insidious 3, you're in luck. This one mostly gets it right. And with writer Wannell not having the split focus he did on the last installment, where he also served as director, it's just a plain better film.
Adam Robitel, who did the solid horror flick, The Taking of Deborah Logan, does the honors this time around, and he's just an inherently better director than Wannell was. Not that Wannell was terrible, mind you, he just had a tendency to lean hard on the tropes, which Robitel does not.
There are some genuinely creepy scenes here, notably the one where the "key" ghost "locks" the throat of Melissa, keeping her from being able to scream- a pretty neat idea. While the whole "key" thing is somewhat under-cooked, we get the idea: these are doors which are locked with good reason.
I also liked the touch that Elise is in a very real way, the architect of her own doom. After all, she's the one who opened the door, and even the one who left open other doors to cause her "Further" trouble on down the line. (See what I did there?)
Factor in some funny moments with the ghost hunters, notably the business with them crushing on Elise's nieces- hey, that rhymes! (and sounds like a weird candy of some sort)- and you have a pretty solid follow-up in the ongoing franchise.
While this was a solid entry, they could definitely go bigger for the next one, and end it on an even more exciting note, if they actually did decide to end it for real. Besides, Elise is still stuck in the "Further"- no one wants that, right?
Well, maybe this guy...
Check it out!
Emoji review: 👪👻😱👩💀👧💨👦😒⏰👨👻😨📞👩😧👬👩💨🏡👨😈👻👧💤👩📕👻💪💥👧👆👩💨👨💀👻💨👪💗🏡👦👻😱👩📞👩😟
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