advancescreenings.com free advance movie screenings

Insidious will get your heart pumping, toes curling, and have you sink into the back of your seat. It is the scariest PG-13 movie that has come out in quite a while. It doesn’t have to use easy shock and awe tricks to frighten you or squirt out blood and gore, it genuinely gets under your skin. From the creators of Paranormal Activity and Saw, these guys know how to get you on the edge of your seat and keep you there through the entire film. With Insidious, they play with you, giving you bits and pieces of other frightening films and then throw something completely different at you…it was wonderful.


The movie starts off with a family moving into a new house which starts misbehaving on its own. Initially, this makes you think it’s just another Paranormal Activity clone. Some books fly off a bookshelf, a ladder in the attic breaks, weird house noises creek here and there, you know, the norm. But then Dalton (Ty Simpkins), Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai Lambert (Rose Byrne)’s son falls into a deep coma and doesn’t wake up for 3 months. The doctors run all the medical tests on him but all the scans come back normal. They can’t figure out what’s wrong with him and throughout it all, Renai keeps seeing creepy figures in her house.

Renai gets fed up and makes Josh move the family again…she’s sick and tired of the house and whatever is haunting it. While the husband in typical haunting films tells his wife to just suck it up, Josh actually gets the moving van the next day and they get the hell out of there. But hell follows them…it’s not the house. In comes Josh’s mother (Barbara Hershey) who brings in her old paranormal-expert friend, Elise (Lin Shaye) along with some startling information for Josh which you could have figured out by now. From here, the movie turns from a waiting game to a search and rescue mission…and another stage of scariness!

I didn’t like the acting for most of this film. Sure, Josh and Renai are a typical couple but there wasn’t anything special from their performances. It wasn’t until the about the middle to end of the movie when this hot pocket eating ghost hunter duo (Leigh Whannell and Angus Sampson) who looked more like a mix of the geek squad and Jehovah’s witnesses show up and add the comic relief that I started enjoying the characters. I smiled along with the creativity that came along with them and Elise. You may have seen a seance before, but not like how Insidious did it. I typically don’t like the whole explanation routine where movies try to shine light on everything going on and make sense of the unknown but I quite enjoyed it in this film and could believe every part of it. They came up with something new and it worked.

Even with this new fresh vision, almost everything in Insidious screamed amateur hour. From the costumes to the orchestral music to the acting, etc. From the very beginning opening credits, you can tell this movie had a low budget and was pretty cheesy. The scary figures’ costumes and special effects were really crappy…laughable even. But it shows that they didn’t need that to make audiences jump out of their seats. They slowly built the tense feelings, threw in a couple dead ends and gotchas, and then laid out the full mysterious story that drew you in for the final screams. But even then, when you think you’ve figured it all out…they get you with something more! The scares don’t stop and I loved this movie for that. I was smiling every step of the way enjoying the twists and turns of the storyline. This is one of those movies that I can’t wait to see again.

Tags: Angus Sampson, Insidious, Leigh Whannell, Lin Shaye, Paranormal Activity, Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Saw, Ty Simpkins

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Reviews, South By Southwest 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.