Annabelle

Annabelle (2014)

29% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 119 reviews)

Runtime: 99 minutes

Directed by: John R. Leonetti

Starring: Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Tony Amendola, Alfre Woodard, Eric Ladin

From: Warner Bros./New Line Cinema

Even though I heard from most people that this was awful, I still took the chance on renting it for streaming. Well... it's not the worst horror movie I had ever seen... I explain why in my Letterboxd review below why this was still bad:

To be honest, the main reason why I watched this is not that I expected this to be good, although there have been horror films I've liked more than the general public does. Rather, it's to mention that at one time I saw Robert the Doll, another famous haunted doll. It resides in a museum in Key West, Florida. I saw it in person almost 10 years ago. One big thing is that you're supposed to ask it for permission before you take its picture; really. I didn't do that as I didn't believe. Well, a little later during my time down there, I visited Biscayne National Park (it's south of Miami) and I tried to visit an island in the park that's only accessible by boat. Well, the one boat suddenly did not work so I was out of luck... some crappy luck has happened to me since then but it's just fate which caused it, and if that doll DID do anything (which I don't think it did), I can live with it trolling me by not letting me visit an island... at least everyone got back the money they paid to go there.

And yes I have heard that some people in the UK made an obvious Annabelle clone called Robert and it's a howlingly bad take on the legend of Robert the Doll and it makes this movie look like The Conjuring in comparison.

But anyhow, onto this film. It's a prequel and a spinoff of The Conjuring, where we follow the famous real life doll Annabelle and even before those young nursing students got it, it belonged to a young couple in swingin' 1969 Southern California; an incident happens where the newly acquired doll gets possessed by Annabelle Higgins, which fits the mythology of the real life doll but rather loosely. After all, it was a random little girl with that name who is said to haunt the doll and not the wacky woman in a cult who bled on it and apparently from that cursed it. Hell, the real life doll is a Raggedy Ann doll and not the creepy as hell porcelain doll that is in those movies; one of the many problems with this is that Mia the female lead loves dolls so she gets that one as a gift... it was absurd that she loved it right away as even before it was cursed it looked real creepy; after it's cursed and its appearance is more horrid, she still loves it and it becomes laughable.

To me the biggest problem with this movie is that what The Conjuring gets right, this gets wrong. I suppose that's what happens when you go from James Wan to a director whose only previous major film was the legendary Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. John R. Leonetti should stick with cinematography, as that at least looked fine here and that's what he usually does on films. The jump scares are lame and predictable. You don't really care about the lead couple; the most I can say about them is that I found it greatly amusing the lead actress's name in real life is Annabelle. You don't really care about what's going on with the story as it's all so silly. Really, there's no need to ever see this. Sure, there's some unintentional laughs and I shook my head when I saw that the movie credited its usage of the Spiral Starecase song More Today Than Yesterday and said that the band was “Spiral Staircase”... but otherwise this is just lame, and something where they use an obvious Rosemary's Baby reference and it reminds you that you'd be better off watching Rosemary's Baby instead.

Aside from some sort of creepy moments, this was as bad as I had heard most people say it was; talk about disappointing, considering how surprisingly great The Conjuring turned out to be.