The Conjuring Review

[Westside Steve]

The Conjuring

New Line

R 112 min

Dear friends your humble narrator has had is very bad week. As a matter of fact that's one of the reasons I've only had time to do one movie review for this issue and I apologize for that. No need to go into the details but one repercussion is that in selecting the particular film to review I used box office numbers as a deciding criterion. So while I'm hoping I used that word correctly the number one money maker for the current week turns out to have been THE CONJURING. Now I fully realize that it's summertime and kids are out of school. I also took note of the fact that other films released the same week featured, well let's call them senior citizens. Jeff Bridges Bruce Willis and Adam Sandler are grandparents age to the 14-year-old audience. They took the bait and flocked to the horror movie much as their contemporaries Beavis and Butthead might have. Now I don't hate horror movies but I must admit that a greater percentage of them are terrible than most other genres.

While there are certainly a few that are truly horrifying the great bulk is pretty damn poor and THE CONJURING falls squarely into that second category. So though I wouldn't have thought it possible its made by bad week a little worse. What we have here is your typical cheapo amalgamation of other previous and better films. The plot combines the elements of both THE AMITYVILLE HORROR and THE EXORCIST with the art direction of THAT 70's SHOW.

At any rate the production team here would like us to believe that this was based on actual events. Apparently the two protagonists a married couple of professional ghost busters are actual human beings who have written and lectured on their exploits in the supernatural industry. Still if I was a betting man I'd put my money on the line that says it's a complete crock of...

Here's what happens: a young family has gotten a tremendous deal on a run down and ramshackle old house in the woods. Its going to be a family project to restore the old hulk to its previous glory but wait! Its not long before strange things start happening. You know, the strange banging on the walls the noise is the pictures falling from the mantle piece the odd smell the ghostly images the kids see in the mirrors that mysteriously disappear when they turn around to look. All that crap. Then the spirits get even more aggressive grabbing and chasing and frightening the family nearly to death. That's when they pick up the phone and call demon exterminators Ed and Loraine Warren. Well they determine that an exorcism is the only way to rid the house of the evil spirits. That's when, pardon the expression, all hell breaks loose. Ed and Loraine convince a priest of this but the Catholic Church, but not unlike the Time Warner repairman, is late to the party and Ed is forced to perform the exorcism himself. It really is the SOS, I mean the same old spook we've seen in dozens of these rip off flicks. Here the acting, while certainly nothing spectacular, isn't as bad as some but the special effects seem especially cheesy given the state of the art these days.

And on top of it all just in case you are a big fan of blood and guts and vulgarity, its really not that big a deal. Maybe they went out of their way to get that R rating to fool people into thinking it was going to be some kind of gore fest. Not even a little bad language or frontal nudity to take the edge off the boredom.

 

D+

 

WSS

[miktoxic]

yeah just by seeing the trailers i can tell this movie's horror 'gotchas' are based on the quick trick like the victim getting pulled away from the camera as if by a demon trick, the crawling on the walls, the victim looking at the camera not noticing an aborition of some kind sneaking up behind them.

 

cookie cutter movie making.

 

and what's worse are the ads showing 'fan reaction' scenes as if they just saw satan himself flying out of the screen.

 

pass.

[nickers]

An American haunting was a far better picture..at least donald Southerland has creedence as an actor.