Annabelle

Starring: Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Alfre Woodard & Tony Amendola

Directed by: John R. Leonetti

Rating: ★

The Conjuringmay not have been a particularly great horror movie, but it had its moments, mainly the parts about the haunted doll, Annabelle.

Annabelle was the best part of The Conjuring.

So in true Hollywood fashion, some producers decided to take the best bit from an otherwise underwhelming movie and make a spinoff-prequel.

And like a fool, I decided to go and see it.

When will I ever learn?

Seriously, just smash its head in... It's only a doll!

The strangest things about Annabelle are as follows:

1) It’s horribly boring.

2) It isn’t scary.

3) The spooky puppet is hardly in the film. Annabelle is actually about another monster, a demon that is much more frightening and gets all the best moments.

Everyone seems to be scared of Annabelle, except the audience...

So a movie about a freaky dolly is actually not about the titular toy at all.

Perhaps the producers will do another spinoff about the demon, and ruin that one too.

But the weirdest thing is that, in The Conjuring, Annabelle was an intensely disturbing villain, and in this movie she’s just… bland.

The doll never actually does anything, which is a massive problem because it makes the movie so boring!

Annabelle tries it’s best to be scary, but in doing so uses every single tired cliché of the horror genre.

It has a baby, an evil cult, a priest, and a human sacrifice. But none of these elements ever, at any point, work together to be interesting or entertaining.

Can the priest save the day? Well this is a horror movie, so what do you think?

The story is about a painfully boring couple, Mia (Wallis) and John (Horton), who get attacked by two members of an evil cult, one of whom possesses the Annabelle doll. When their baby is born, Mia is convinced that the doll wants their child’s soul, and then enlists the help of a local priest (Amendola) and, for some bizarre reason, a local bookshop owner (Woodard). This is all that happens in the movie, minus several hundred long shots of Mia walking down various corridors slowly.

Mia just loves walking as slow as possible down long corridors...

There are some jumps and some spooky sequences, but for a film with a miniscule running time, I felt like it was just going on forever. I was almost falling asleep, and in a horror movie, this really isn’t a good thing at all.

What do you do if a demonic doll is terrorizing you? Ask a bookstore owner!

Annabelle is so dull, mainly because the opening is some sort of family melodrama about an achingly ‘perfect’ couple who are instantly dislikeable, and the rest is about Mia either running around a house and screaming or talking about running around a house and screaming.

Just smash the doll already!

There are two or three very good, very frightening moments, but these don’t involve Annabelle. They are all centred on the new character, who is actually the main threat of the movie, the unnamed shadowy demon who appears at crucial points to make you jump out of your seat.

I really wouldn't go up to that locker room by myself...

This demon really is petrifying, and the best bit in the entire movie, which makes no logical sense but works well because it’s scary, is when Mia goes up to a locker room and gets trapped in a lift.

The best- and only scary- moment in the entire movie is what happens in the cages and the lift...

But, ironically just like in The Conjuring, the actually scary villain is horribly underplayed, as instead we get thousands of lingering shots of a bloodshot eyed evil doll, a device that quickly gets repetitive and tiring.

Oh Annabelle. After twenty minutes of  not doing anything, no one is afraid of you anymore...!

I was annoyed that Annabelle was rubbish. The doll worked so well in The Conjuring that it must have been a real effort to screw it up for this spinoff. Whoever was in charge of deciding the content of this movie should be fired, because they ruined what could have been a really great horror movie.

Or maybe it couldn’t have been. Maybe Annabelle only really worked as a supporting character in another movie.

Who knows?

All I know is that I’ve wasted my precious money and time on another awful movie.