Annabelle: Creation - Review

A nun and a small group of orphaned girls find residence at the remote home of a former toymaker only to get tangled up by the ghost of his late daughter and the dark forces seemingly coming from a creepy doll. All of that plus a ton of crappy jump scares in the prequel to a reviled spinoff of THE CONJURING, featuring the most overrated modern horror "icon" of our time. ANNABELLE: CREATION might just be another lame, average hauntfest for many viewers, the type that will tide you over one lazy night, but I frankly could not stand any of it. The script has a gardens of whiskers on it and is chock-full of useless padding, plot holes and sheer dumb character behavior. For example, the film has a cast of six girls but only four of them have anything to do: the two not-really-mean teenagers and the central duo. Meanwhile, the middle two tweens, one of whom is the token black character, just stand around when they aren't talking about boys. The story also never explains why the girls refuse to close doors during scary scenarios, never even try to physically destroy the evil doll, or why in the hell the closest that was supposed to contain the evil spirit still has a working lock on it and is not barricaded from outside interference. The major frights are all so unbelievable telegraphed and they of course end with a sudden boo. The only emotion that these supposed shocks can barely draw out of the viewer is pure sheer laughter; whether it was the opening car accident, the chair ejection or the swapping of black puke, I couldn't stop mocking these poorly produced spooks. I can't even give any praise to anyone in the acting department, as all of the young female actors go through the motions. I felt particularly bad for Talitha Bateman, who could have broken out from this picture as the polio-stricken and ill-fated main protagonist but she's not very great in the first half and she's absolutely not scary in the slightest during the second half. However, the ingénues are all Oscar caliber performers compared to dramatic heavyweights Anthony LaPaglia and Miranda Otto, who just sleepwalk throughout the entire movie. That goes double for Otto since she legitimately spends the majority of her time on screen laying in bed with a dumb tin mask on the left side of her face. And to top it all off, this prequel to a spinoff sets up another separate spinoff to the CONJURING franchise thanks to a stupid insert scene in the beginning and a stinger at the end. Actually, I can end this review with one good thing to say about it: at least director David F. Sandberg did a marginally better job here then when he made LIGHTS OUT.


FINAL REVIEW: 1 / 5