Home Reviews Review: Annabelle Comes Home

Review: Annabelle Comes Home

Image from Warner Bros. Pictures' ANNABELLE COMES HOME

To this point, The Conjuring Cinematic universe has been a mix that usually sits between mediocre and good. Of course, The Conjuring is still probably their best movie to date, but their biggest failure was probably the first Annabelle movie. Officially merging the two together in order to create a new film looked like a good idea on the surface, but obviously, execution would play a deciding factor in whether or not it could work.

In the third installment of the Annabelle movies, we catch up with the possessed doll soon after Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) gain control of it. The skill and knowledge they possess leads you to believe that locking the doll away with all the other artifacts they’ve confiscated over the years is a wise move. However, one night shows that even when you’re extremely careful, there are ways for something this evil to find its way out and wreak havoc on all it comes into contact with.

Because it’s horror and because of the potential I thought it had, my excitement for Annabelle Comes Home was pretty high. I didn’t assume it would be good, but I was hoping it would be. Even if it didn’t reach that kind of level, I at least wanted it to be better than the likes of Annabelle and The Nun. In reality, that shouldn’t be all that difficult if we’re being completely honest about it.

Unfortunately, asking this to be better than those two movies proved to be too much to ask. While Annabelle Comes Home provides us with some conventional features, there’s a lot of emptiness in this movie as far as attempted scares are concerned. The movie lacks so much in this area, that at one point, it seemed like they forgot that they were supposed to be making a horror movie.

With a movie like The Nun, you at least a horror movie tone even though it suffers from the same problems as this one does. You find yourself waiting for something to happen, but you realize they’re just wasting time since they don’t really have much to offer. Most of the time here is dedicated to us watching three young girls hanging out. And instead of it taking place in an old, run-down church like in The Nun, we’re stuck with these girls running around a normal looking house.

During most of this time, we see more pizza and cake than we do evil spirits. This isn’t what you’re supposed to rely on when you’re talking about a horror movie. And when you look at so much of what’s included throughout this run time, the movie comes off as more of a teenage romantic comedy that nobody wants to see. Obviously, this takes a significant amount of steam out of the movie. I don’t know how they thought this was a good idea.

It takes forever, but once we do get into the horror stuff, it’s not the worst we’ve seen to get into most of the horror stuff. Once we reach where we expected to, but it is stuff that we’ve definitely seen. I could see this as being fine for a lot of people. The problems come from them taking so long to get into it. At this point in the movie, most people who are watching have probably figured out that these guys may have run out of ideas.

Once we get past most of the romantic comedy stuff (it never actually leaves), the horror is presented in the same fashion that we see in every one of these movies now. Most of it is just build up as we get spirits moving things around and seemingly just trying to annoy people rather than acting like real threats. I understand if this was done early in the movie, but we need you to move faster and harder now since we’ve seen this exact same thing as many times as we have.

One of the other big disappointments for me was the fact that Ed and Lorraine Warren aren’t in the movie much. Maybe having them at the center of everything could have made this more bearable. But after they introduce to the movie and bring us into this world, they essentially just disappear and aren’t used at all.

I’m sure this will bother some people. They’ve been used to sell and promote the movie because their presence may help bring people out. I don’t know, maybe they’re only supposed to be in the middle of everything in the Conjuring movies. If so, we might see them take over in The Conjuring 3 if that becomes a thing in the near future. They can definitely make it happen based on all of the other cases they’ve taken on over the years.

Logically, Annabelle Comes Home doesn’t work well either. That’s mostly because Lorraine Warren’s psychic powers probably should have come into play at some point before we ever get close to the film’s final act. I won’t go into specifics, but this alone shows why this movie couldn’t work. Then again, I’m talking about things that people may not care about since the movie is such a waste overall.

Anyway, I’m hoping that these dudes find more ways to make things more interesting and fresh. I’m not asking for these to be amazing or anything. I just want them to be more entertaining and have a little more effort put into them. And since it’s horror, they don’t even have to be all that good. Most scary movies aren’t really. A lot of people go into them wanting them to be, but we ultimately just want to have a good time. If you can do that, you’ll keep us coming back for more.

Rating: R

Director: Gary Dauberman

Screenplay: Gary Dauberman

Cast:
Mckenna Grace
Madison Iseman
Katie Sarife
Patrick Wilson
Vera Farmiga

Film Length: 100 minutes

Release Date: June 26, 2019

Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures

  • 3/10
    Score - 3/10
3/10
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