The opening shot of Insidious promises lame visuals the likes of numerous online websites purporting to have evidence of ghosts, you know blurry shapes in the background of photos, shadows in windows (except the opening shot of the film doesn’t bother to let us know that there’s no one there to cast this shadow, so this is in no way scary or even necessarily interesting), an old grandfather clock at the end of a hallway… because clocks are so scary (and, SPOILER alert: the clock is never relevant to the plot in any way).
The opening titles, and the music cues (with screeching violins that someone thought would be reminiscent of old gothic horror films but which in practice was taken too far) are lame. For no reason other than maybe the director thinks older horror films are cool, the shots during the title sequence are in black and white, with red smoky titles, you know the kinda stuff that would be cool to add to your homemade video maybe but that was silly anywhere else for at least a couple decades now… if not forever.
And then, the story begins. Mother and son have matching pajamas… no reason, and she never wears them again, it’s just something to make cute a scene that isn’t already, shouldn’t be, and really still isn’t even with the matching pajamas. Insert Chekhov’s photo album—for those who don’t get the reference, Chekhov’s gun, aka the gun on the mantle, is a fairly basic trick of drama. You introduce the gun in the first act, it goes off in the final act. Of course, the real trick is to not make the gun so obvious, but oh, no, there are no photos of your father as a child, at all, is such a silly detail that there’s absolutely no way that won’t come up later.
But, anyway, on with the story. Seems, a couple who seem to be barely middle class—he’s a high school teacher and she, well, briefly it seems like she’s a songwriter, but that is a useless detail inserted to add some depth or something (and to have one of their boxes go missing and have it matter to these characters… except she barely seems concerned, finds it like one scene after she’s noticed it’s missing and husband can’t be bothered to care it’s gone, so I guess he doesn’t care much for her songwriting… except there’s an attempt at a “cute” bedroom scene in which she asks which of her songs is his favorite, he suggest she write a song about him, laughter ensues and if there’d been a cinematically appropriate sex scene to follow, maybe there would have been something good in this film…
Anyway, backtracking, there are boxes (one of which went missing and shows up in the attic) because husband and wife and three kids, one named Dalton, and the other two named extraneous and superfluous, have just moved into a new house. And, despite random box from moving showing up in attic, the attic is in no way scary. Still, Dalton finds his way up there when the door opens itself, which really doesn’t jibe with the rest of the film, as the spirits don’t need him up there, and his going in the attic serves no actual plot purpose… seriously, though he falls off the broken ladder (another Chekhov’s gun set up maybe two scenes earlier when wife ventured into the attic and found her box of sheet music, even though she will only be seen near the piano once and that is probably just because the filmmaker thought it would be more interesting than her doing something housewife-ish) and hits his head—somehow hurting the front of his head even though he obviously hits the back of it, by the way—this ISN’T the cause of his coma… oh wait, “it’s not a coma, they don’t know what to call it,” as the line in the trailer goes, except yeah, it’s a coma, the doctor says it’s a coma, he just doesn’t know what’s caused Dalton to go all comatose. But, “not a coma” is so much more mysterious than “coma of unknown origin” I guess.
Anyway, Dalton into coma, jump ahead a few months, wife is all depressed—maybe that’s why she isn’t wearing her pajamas anymore, except such a detail of characterization seems far too complicated for this script; it’s more likely the costume department lost them. But, she’s sitting at the piano, writing a song and hears a voice over the baby monitor. So, she heads up to baby superfluous’ room and there’s no one there. And, the scares begin… (at this point, I wish that “not” line from Wayne’s World hadn’t gotten old, because that is exactly the lame joke I need)
Some other stuff happens, husband stays late at work (and there’s a drawing of the clown from Saw (a much better film that I now must assume was entirely because of the script, because James Wan is an awful director) just to make us hope Jigsaw will show up, or maybe this film is actually our Jigsaw trap, and we have to chew through our own eyes so we don’t have to see anymore of this) for no reason except wife is annoying, extraneous says he doesn’t like how Dalton walks around at night—oh, forgot to mention, Dalton is now at home, with medical stuff hooked up to him and everything; there’s even a brief scene in which the nurse shows wife how to insert a breathing tube in his nose, and there’s some cheesy line in there, the nurse telling the wife that the universe messed with the wrong woman, or something like that, even though we have no reason to a) think the nurse knows anything about wife, b) believe that wife is at all capable of caring for her comatose kid or c) care.
There are some ghosts, a kid who changes the song on the turntable—yes, wife has a turntable to go with the grandfather clock, because in this film there is nothing new, no new ideas and no new technology—and laughs and runs around, which doesn’t make him scary so much as a) potentially cute and b) mildly annoying. There’s also some large man in a trenchcoat who paces on the balcony then shows up in bedroom to lunge at wife and… well, not make contact because… well, I’m not sure why. Several times in the film, these spirits, be they ghosts or demons are simply scared away by the light being turned on—which really means there’s an easy way to protect Dalton, just turn on the lights in his room, but that’s too obvious—but in this instance, I think he just went away. And, eventually, there’s also the titular (well, Darth Maul’s Retarded Little Brother should’ve been the title at least) Junior Sith Lord, who’s a demon, who likes to paint half his face red, sharpen his fingers on an old grinding wheel and listen to “tiptoe through the tulips” mostly because, apparently, the filmmaker thinks that song is creepy. Except, combined with Junior Sith Lord, it’s just good for a laugh at how pathetic this film has gotten.
Enter husband’s mother, who tells us about a dream she had with Junior Sith Lord hanging out in Dalton’s room, and she tells us his voice is scary and unforgettable, but we don’t actually get to hear it. But, anyway, husband’s mother calls psychic lady, who is preceded by her comic sidekick investigators, who check out the house… oh, and this is another new house, because husband believed wife just enough to move out of the other house but not enough to trust psychic lady later—his scale of appropriate responses to wife hallucinating is a bit mixed up. There’s still a grandfather clock, which serves no purpose (well, possibly to tell the time, but that is hardly relevant to the plot), and there are still ghosts and demons and whatnot. Turns out—another classic line from the trailer—“it’s not the house that’s haunted, it’s your son” or rather it’s loser couple-that-are-trying-to-act-way-too-much-for-such-a-bad-film’s son. Enter psychic exposition lady to explain the plot. SPOILER ALERT, if anyone cares: Dalton can astral project when he sleeps, but he’s gone too far away this time into a place psychic lady calls “the further.” It’s this dark place where the souls of the dead are, all scary and tormented, but I guess “hell” was trademarked, so they couldn’t use that name. And, all these ghosts and Junior Sith Lord are hanging around to take Dalton’s soul’s place in his body. Now, this is a little weird in the case of Junior Sith Lord because, well, what good is it to be in some little kid’s body when you could instead be a demon? A demon can freak people out, maybe even whisper in their ears and get them to make really bad horror films to, you know, ruin the world. A little boy—he tries something and you just gotta smack him around a bit. But, apparently, Dalton’s body is a good place to be… but there’s more. Chekhov’s gun come home to roost, to mix metaphors—seems husband has no childhood photos because his mother stopped taking pictures of him and hid away the few photos she has because there’s some old woman that kept showing up in them; see he was just like Dalton, and this old woman ghost kept hanging out trying to get inside his body when he was young, and so psychic exposition lady made him forget he could astral project and apparently made him forget that normal kids sometimes get their pictures taken.
Husband rightly thinks psychic exposition lady is crazy and kicks her out of the house, but changes his mind like a scene later when he realizes that the same Junior Sith Lord psychic lady’s comic sidekick has scribbled is in Dalton’s drawings on the wall. So, then there’s a séance, with an inappropriately funny gasmask, and some lines about innards being torn out, and I’m wishing these people had their innards torn out, just to make things interesting, but no.
So… the climax: Husband has to astral project all over again, go to Hell, I mean, “The Further” to rescue Dalton. And, Hell is mostly dark and empty, except for a scene with some girl who apparently shot her family to death and they all have smiles on their faces—because smiles are scary—and there’s Darth Maul’s retarded little brother sharpening his fingers and listening to “tiptoe through the tulips” and I’m wishing he was listening to “jeepers creepers” because even in their worst scenes, those two films were far better than this one. So, husband grabs Dalton and runs, because anyone who’s seen any of the Hellraiser films knows that is how one gets away from demons… and how much better would this have been if Pinhead showed up? But I digress. Dalton wakes up, everything is fine…
SPOILER ALERT, but if you’ve read this far, what do you care? Husband seems all normal until psychic lady looks at him weird then takes his photo. He strangles her, but wife and husband’s mother and Dalton can’t hear from the next room because Dalton is gorging on spaghetti, because that is what one needs after a good coma, to fill one’s stomach as fast as possible. Anyway, wife finally hears… something, finds psychic lady dead—which means no more exposition, so wife has no idea what’s going on, until she picks up psychic lady’s camera, because, you know, getting that camera off the floor is more important than, say, calling the police. She sees photo of husband, rather, photo of old woman from his childhood photos, and husband comes up behind her as she’s looking at the camera, and cut to the INSIDIOUS title and screeching violins again and finally, we’re free.
