“Insidious” begins with an old woman lurking in a house corridor while a young boy named Dalton is sleeping in his room. Renai and Josh Lambert (Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson) have recently moved into a new house with their three children. One morning, Renai begins looking through a family photo album with her son, Dalton (Ty Simpkins). He asks why there are no pictures of Josh when he was a child. Renai reasons that he has always been camera shy. Dalton tells Renai he is scared of his new room. One day, Dalton hears something in the attic. When he goes to investigate he sees something off screen that scares him and takes a fall when the attic ladder breaks. The next day Josh goes to wake Dalton, but he does not move. They rush him to the hospital where the doctors say he is in an unexplained coma.
Three months later Dalton is moved home, still in the coma. Disturbing events begin to occur. Renai believes the house is haunted when she begins to see and hear people in the house. She confronts Josh about the events and the family soon moves to another house. In the new house, increasingly violent and supernatural events begin to happen again. Josh’s mother, Lorraine (Barbara Hershey), contacts a friend, Elise Reiner (Lin Shaye), who deals with paranormal activities. The family, Elise, and her team go into Dalton’s room. There, she sees and describes a figure to one of her two assistants, who draws a black figure with a red face and dark hollow eyes.
Blah, blah, blah. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again…PG-13 horror movies are dull, boring, and predictable (“Drag Me to Hell” is the sole highlight from the last decade of PG-13 horror). Poor Lin Shaye and Rose Byrne, they deserve much better material than what they are given to work with here. “Insidious” offers no thrills, has inane plotting, and the final twist ending is so preposterous that it has to be seen to be believed. Don’t, however, watch this movie based on that last remark. You’ll be sorry later.
