The Conjuring - Review

It appears that James Wan took every single cliche feature of every horror film of the past 20 years, put them in a large mixing bowl, added a shitty script and some half-assed acting and put it in the oven to bake for 112 minutes. The cake we receive at the end of the running time is burnt, bland and tasteless. Excuse the metaphor, but it's the only thing that I felt could liven up this review that is quite frankly going to slate the entire film.

Directing such great horror films as Insidious and Saw, James Wan should have the genre completely sussed out. With these two films, I felt genuine respect for the director, they were ground breaking plot wise and really, really scary, with The Conjuring, however, I don't think I've ever been so disappointed whilst watching a film- perhaps an overstatement but anyway, lets continue. With a sold out cinema on a tuesday night several weeks into the film's release, everybody in the theatre was giddy when the opening titles played, awkwardly laughing in order to hide their nerves from their friends or their dates. The awkward laughter quickly turned to full fledged hilarity before the film had even hit half of the running time. The predictable 'scares' (if they can be called that), attempts at creating dramatic tension along with the plot taking itself far too seriously meant that the once nervous crowd had to remind themselves that this film wasn't a joke throughout. I, myself, felt like checking my phone half way through the feature just to clarify that this wasn't a parody of every shitty horror film ever made. Sadly, it wasn't.

Disregarding the fact that it was based on a true story, the character's were too many for the audience to even try and feel a connection to any one of them during the 1 hour 50 minutes of the film, meaning the connection, or lack thereof, we were meant to share with these characters, only identifiable through the fact we are of the same species, rendered the psychological horror aspects of the film useless. I did not care about a single character in this film, in fact, I was hoping a few of them would die off in order for me to possibly remember the names of some of them, sadly my wishes weren't granted. Without psychological scares, we are left with jump scares, and jump scares only to scare us, and giving them the credit they deserve, there were a few shouts from unsuspecting audience members who had quite clearly never seen a horror film before and were not aware of the lack of originality in the build up to these events, but for the most part, there were no surprises in the hands, faces and slamming doors meant to shock viewers.

Following another of the popular features of horror at the moment, The Conjuring uses home video cameras in order to give us a more edgy view of the events occurring. Whether the effect of these clips was to make us feel more intimate with the characters and closer to the events occurring, or whether they were used in order to give the audience a genuine headache (only one of which was effective), I don't know, however the only thing displayed to me through this feature was once again the unoriginality of the whole project.

I understand the one sided-ness of this review, but I honestly cannot remember any redeeming qualities the film offered besides the ending, which I thought was shot so poignantly and was moving, it's a shame that I had no interest in any of the character's well beings after I had just sat through almost two hours of garbage. The film is full of cheap thrills and is no different from any of the other bad horror films being produced at the moment, therefore it is not to say that people who enjoyed films such as The Purge or Texas Chainsaw 3D will not be mind blown by this feature, but for me, it didn't really cut it. Perhaps my expectations were too high from the director's previous works and the circulating reviews I happened to read before watching it, or perhaps I am missing something that most other bloggers and critics are picking up on, the fact of the matter is that I gained nothing from watching this film except a whole lot of laughter.

(I do really, really, dislike writing bad reviews and will rarely post on a film that I saw no good in, but before I went and watched The Conjuring I was dead set on writing something about it because I was expecting something so brilliant, but go and see the film, watch it and make your own mind up, prove me wrong, tell me about all the ways in which the film excited you, scared you and was original, I am such an open minded person that I enjoy listening and reading other people's views on the film).

My letterbox'd review summarises this post for those who did not read it all: