Artistically, it’s hard to sustain, let alone build on, a popular horror franchise. The cinematic “Conjuring” universe – an interconnected series of hit horror films that began with 2013’s ‘”The Conjuring” – has been a critically mixed bag.
Now there’s “Annabelle Comes Home,” the seventh “Conjuring” installment and the third in the standalone trilogy of films about a malevolent doll. If it’s not quite as good as the doll’s origin story, “Creation,” it’s still way more fun than any sequel has any right to be.
Returning to the series’ roots, the new movie opens on Ed and Lorraine Warren, characters based on real-life husband-and-wife consultants of demonology and witchcraft. Played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, Ed and Lorraine refamiliarize us with Annabelle in a short prologue that harks back to the opening scene of “The Conjuring.”
They remove the doll from a home she had been terrorizing and move her to their “artifact room”: a deadbolted repository in their basement where they store objects that are haunted, cursed or just plain evil. Into a vitrine she goes – behind consecrated glass reclaimed from a demolished chapel – after a splash or two of holy water and some mumbled prayers by a Catholic priest.
And that should be that. Their young daughter, Judy, knows better than to mess with her parents’ things. Probably because there are signs all over the place. But Mom and Dad are going out of town, leaving Judy in the care of her hyper-responsible teenage babysitter Mary Ellen and, without their knowledge, Mary Ellen’s not-so-responsible best friend, Daniela. You know those movies where the grown-ups are away and some adolescent troublemaker breaks into the liquor cabinet, invites a few too many friends over and almost trashes the house? That’s basically this movie – except instead of a crowd of rowdy teens, it’s an unholy horde of hellish fiends.
When Daniela sneaks into the artifact room, she accidentally unleashes a miscellany of horror-movie tropes, like none you have ever scene before – at least not all in the same movie. In addition to the titular doll, who keeps materializing where you least expect her, “Annabelle Comes Home” features a laundry list of ghouls, goblins, ghosts and ghastly gadgets, including a werewolf, a bloody bride, various corpses, a haunted television set, a murderous samurai warrior, a gargoyle-like demon, a windup organ-grinder’s monkey and a super-creepy version of the old Milton Bradley game Feeley Meeley. The film is set in the 1970s, and evokes that period nicely, by more than just its appropriate needle-drop soundtrack. It’s also surprisingly funny.
It does not, however, reinvent the genre.
To be completely honest, most of the film’s best moments consist of simple jump scares and little else. But the connection to “It” is no coincidence. Writer-director Gary Dauberman, making his directorial debut here, co-wrote that 2017 film (and also wrote its forthcoming sequel). Like a skilled, workmanlike session musician who has played with some of the greats, he has learned how to pound on familiar, repetitive chords to create a pleasurable rhythm, one you can feel in your spine. The movie is scary, to be sure, but it’s also larky good fun. To quote King Harvest’s “Dancing in the Moonlight,” the 1973 hit song that plays, cheerfully if ironically, over the closing credits, it’s a supernatural delight.
Annabelle Comes Home
(Playing at Stadium 9)
Rating:
R
Genre:
Horror, mystery & suspense
Directed by:
Gary Dauberman
Written by:
Gary Dauberman
Runtime:
1 hr. 40 min.
Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer:61%
