Insidious

Eat this Ju-On!!

When will Hollywood make another horror classic? It has been sometime since The Exorcist (green vomit) and The Shining ("Here's Johnny!) sent a shiver down my spine and make my hairs stand on end. With recent trips into the horror genre with the Haunting in Conneticut and even The Rite, save Sir Anthony Hopkins' performance, I have grown impatient and even a little weary of the meek attempts thus far.

What to expect from a horror film:

1) Sound Editing a.k.a long silences with a sudden boom to frighten you.
2) Scary looking apparition accompanied with a sudden boom to frighten you.
3) Granny floating behind and brushing the hair of the actress (usually blonde) without her knowing, again, to frighten you.
4) Alot of running and screaming. To frighten themselves.

Given the above, I knew what I was getting into when I swiped my credit card for the tickets to Insidious. Touted by many as a remake of the horror classic Poltergeist, (I wet my kiddy shorts back then) I was skeptical it would grab me the same way.

I'm not blonde! What am I doing here?

Much against my expectations, the opening hour and a half was surprisingly good, it built up very well the bond between fear and suspense, a much needed necessity in horror films. With subtle yet tenous creepy images placed in between family living, the audience were prompted to guess whats next?

Enter sound editing! Banging doors, a screeching keyboard synthesized score and flashlights in the dark, it did tingle the numb nerve endings on my spine.

In an almost scene for scene rehash of Poltergeist, household items displacing themselves, a missing kid (the spirit induced coma took care of that), and even a paranormal investigative team, I was anticipating the closet monster to make a cameo.

What got me going, and I thoroughly enjoyed this, was the soundtrack inclusion of Tiptoe through The Tulips, bringing about the playful, mischeivous, and perhaps the insidious nature of the haunting.

Paranormal Combatant in full gear

I was both frightened and awed at the spectacle unfolding before me with the audience screaming, I felt compelled to join the schoolgirl choir and step it up another octave. It felt brand new even when the family brought on board a paranormal psychic in the shape of an old lady. I kept wanting more from the film, which in fact turned out to work against the film.

Having done so well, it fell surprisingly flat in its ending with astral travel and other paranormal activities. It was as if the writers suddenly grew bored or ran out of ideas to end the film as well as it begun. The script became loose and the dialogue almost painful to listen to. With a demon, who has a serious identity crisis, (he can't decide if hes Darth Maul or Freddy Krueger), and other apparitions that seemed to alight from Ghost Ship, it became visually unmoving.

With an expected twist at the end, not spoiling it for you here, I left the cinema with a "What just happened?" feeling. I started to make up my own preferred ending with my partner. Still, it was an absorbing 90 minutes to sit through, and if you scare easily, you would love it. Its a step up in this genre where Hollywood has been faltering in for the longest time.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has always brought me back to the days of Indiana Jones with its sense of adventure and the mystique of the supernatural. Harrison Ford in the Indy movies, made archeology, (grave digging and looting, almost pirate-like) the career choice for the Alpha Male. With slick moves, (women love to hate him) unchivalrous and coarse behaviour, he wasn't your average bespectacled history facinated geek that one would find at dig sites across the globe. He was in fact, the anti archeologist. He represented the exact opposite of what one would expect from a learned professional.

Where am I going? My compass doesn't work

Moving on to POTC, Johnny Depp had done similarly well in portraying a pirate. Dainty at times and eye-liner equipped, he skips across the deck (almost ballet-like) commanding his crew. Viewers quickly fell in love with the anti-pirate in The Curse of the Black Pearl and Dead Man's Chest, however by the third installment At World's End, the audience lost their interest in him, with hardly an engaging plot, and sub-plots that have grown stale, it fell flat at the box office.

So can this fourth installment save the franchise? Why watch another boring POTC movie that has let us down and failed to reach the same heights of excitement it did in the first two movies? Will it bomb out just like the last Indiana Jones with a decaying Harrison Ford headlining? The main reason for us to flock to the cinemas is "I've watched the first three. Lets just watch this. I hope it isn't as painful as the Twilight saga."

On Stranger Tides, does well, well enough better than the last episode, but still failed to remind me of the highs of before. Bringing back the old rivalry of Barbossa and Sparrow early in the film, it quickly becomes a cliche of the third film with them ending up working together. The effects that we loved so much from the earlier films seemed missing from this film and in place simple CGI effects cheapened its outlook. Gore Verbinski had done well in the previous films, his attention to detail, even Davey Jones' tentacled beard on the pipe organ awed many of us. Rob Marshall on the other hand, made a sleepshot attempt with the supernatural powers of Ian McShane, who plays Blackbeard, a pirate (aptly so, he voiced Captain Hook in Shrek the Third) in search of the Fountain of Youth.

What was sorely missing from this installment was the entire supporting cast of the first three with the exception of Master Gibbs played by Kevin McNally, and of course Captain Barbossa played by Geoffery Rush. Will Turner, Elizabeth Swann, Governor Swann, Cutler Beckett, the two goony pirates Pintel and Ragetti with his fake eye, were all left out. Bring on board (pun intended) Ian McShane and Penelope Cruz in place of all of the above? I'd have to say NO! The much loved supporting cast in the previous films have grown to be an irreplaceable aspect of the franchise. Although On Stranger Tides, was pipped to be a spin-off rather than a sequel to the franchise, it still carried the Pirates of the Caribbean brand name. Leaving them out would be as detrimental as having Mercedes-Benz making a new model without all the frills. Imagine a Merc without power windows, memory seats, in-built GPS etc. All we are left with is a shell, an empty shell of a POTC movie.