I had planned to go see The Woman King at some point, but things keep coming up. Yesterday, for example, I had an unexpectedly long stay at a mechanic’s for what I had thought would be routine maintenance and the annual state inspection, but then there were other things that needed to be done to pass inspection, I was there for something like three or so hours, and I wasn’t in much of a mood to see anything outside of my own home after all that.
But hey, it’s October, and I have a lot of horror movies on various watchlists. I figured I might as well start with the Conjuring spin-off Annabelle since that doll is James Wan’s mascot. He even snuck that creepy thing into Aquaman…
It’s the 1960s, and Santa Monica area doctor John Form (Ward Horton) gifts his pregnant wife Mia (Annabelle Wallis) with a porcelain doll. She collects the things. However, not long after that, the older married couple next door are violently murdered when their estranged daughter and her boyfriend, both members of some kind of a cult, return home. The cultish couple then attack John and Mia, though they are ultimately saved by the police. Mia took a stab wound to her pregnant belly, and while there doesn’t seem to be any damage to the unborn child, she is required to stay home and get bed rest until she gives birth. That basically just means she gets to witness the strange things that are happening around her home, many of them seemingly connected with that doll.
As anyone who has seen the first Conjuring movie knows, the doll named Annabelle is not exactly a harmless inanimate object. There’s something attached to it, and that something wants something from John and Mia, or more likely, it wants something from their infant daughter Leah. Mia especially is subjected to many odd and terrifying sights and sounds, many of them looking like a small girl who may or may not also be an adult woman. And when the family’s parish priest can’t seem to put a stop to the demon with the doll, things may get a little too deadly for the new parents.
So, there has always been a part of me that wonders about Annabelle the doll: why would anyone buy this doll for a loved one? It always seems to look dirty, damaged, and outright creepy. The real Annabelle, the one that the real Ed and Loraine Warren stashed away, was a Raggedy Ann doll (and I spotted one of those in a scene in an antique shop). That makes sense. Annabelle even before she’s all that damaged just looks kinda wrong.
By the by, I am aware that the Warrens have frequently been accused of making everything up, but these movies treat them like the real deal, so like I always say when I review a movie set in the Conjuring-verse, I will speak of them as if they were the real deal for the purposes of this review. Whether or not the “real” Annabelle really is cursed or possessed is immaterial.
However, that leads me back to the main problem with the Annabelle movie: Annabelle, well, just sits there. Now, if Annabelle got up and walked around like Chucky or something, that would make for a very different movie, but instead, this is a movie where a lot of people seem to be freaking out over a doll that literally just sits there. Yes, there are ghostly apparitions on display, but it’s still all focused around the doll. Add in the fact that director John R Leonetti is not as good at ractheting up the tension as Wan, here in a producer’s role, and I can see there’s some truth to what I have heard that Wan’s best work in the Conjuring movies come when he’s directing and not just producing the movies. There are some decently creepy scenes, but this movie just isn’t all that scary.
Grade: C
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