By Lindsi Hebert, Staff Reporter.
Directed by John R. Leonetti (Insidious, The Conjuring) and released Oct. 3, “Annabelle” is the prequel to the popular horror movie, “The Conjuring”. “Annabelle” starts out simple enough; a new family lives in a quiet suburb in the seventies. Mia (Annabelle Wallis), the wife, is pregnant with the couple’s first child. Her husband (Ward Horton) is on the cusp of getting a residency at a hospital in Pasadena, and he’s bought his wife a present: Annabelle, a terrifying looking doll. Mia is ecstatic and puts the doll in the soon-to-be baby’s nursery.
That night, their neighbors are murdered by a satanic cult in the wake of the Manson murders. The cultists are eventually killed by police, with some blood getting on Annabelle, thus sealing the curse and the couple’s fate in the process and giving us the villain of the movie. Mia’s baby is born, her husband gets his residency and the couple move to a nice apartment complex in Pasadena, and Annabelle tags along for the ride. This is where the shenanigans start. At first, just small things that eventually lead up to a demon wanting Mia’s baby’s soul. (Insert thunder and lightning here.)
There were some good things about Annabelle. I had to think on it a while to find them, but they’re there. First, the overall plot was actually kind of cool. It reminded me of a mix between “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Child’s Play”, with possessed dolls and Satan thrown in the mix. The acting in “Annabelle” is done really well for a horror movie. That being said, the father did not deliver in this film. He was hardly in it, and it felt like the only reason he was in this movie at all was because Mia needed to have a husband. He never once thought his wife was losing her mind even after she starts screaming about the doll being evil. For lack of a better term, his character wasn’t very realistic.
“Annabelle” was also incredibly BORING. It relies on jump scares, which work once or twice and then never again because you realize the movie is too cheap to put anything actually scary in the film. The movie also uses Annabelle the doll to create tension, so most of the movie consists of close ups of the doll’s face with some music for atmosphere and then nothing happens.
While I was watching “Annabelle”, there was a couple in front of me and one of them fell asleep right up till the end when the noise from a jump scare woke him up. That’s a sign that your horror movie is terrible, because it’s not doing what horror movies are supposed to do, which is scare the living tar out of you! It didn’t help that once you finally get to a scary part, you blink and it’s gone.
You don’t even really get a chance to see the scary things before it transitions into another scene.
“Annabelle” is a bad movie for way more reasons than I could ever fit into one review. If you scare incredibly easily, watch it, you might like it. If you’re a huge horror movie fan, don’t waste your time. I’d say wait until it shows up on Netflix, but I’m not sure you should even watch it then. Don’t waste your money on “Annabelle”, you’ll be thanking me later.