Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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It's Just Not as Good Insidious Chapter 2 (Rated PG-13) by HEATHER GRIFFITHS I still like the spirit of Blumhouse productions, even if Insidious: Chapter 2 (106 minutes) wasn't as good as Insidious. Director James Wan, fresh off his success with The Conjuring, returns for the sophomore entry in the franchise. He does an adequate job but fails to recapture the magic of the first film. Bishara's score almost saves it — he does know how to time the scary music — but that just highlights all the ways in which the director failed to generate suspense. When Insidious left off, Present Day Elise (Lin Shaye) was dead on a chair, and stupid Renai (Rose Byrne) with the stupidly spelled name was gasping in horror at the image left behind on a nearby camera. The sequel picks up at an earlier point in the story, with a young Lorraine Lambert (Jocelin Donahue from House of the Devil) working with Young Carl (Hank Harris) to help her son, Josh (Garret Ryan). Carl has called in Young Elise (Lindsay Seim), and I must note for posterity the bad dubbing of Lin Shaye's voice over Lindsay Seim's, and how irritating it is. After some discussion of "What's Wrong With Josh" the film skips forward to the present. Renai is pulling her patented confused look while explaining to a nice police officer that she really doesn't know what killed the dead psychic, but it probably wasn't Josh (Patrick Wilson). "Good enough for me," the nice police officer says, and we move forward to the rest of the film. Released on his own recognizance an hour or so later, as the police often do with Upper-Class White Males, Josh and family settle into his mother's house. The next day, Josh reassures his wife that everything is cool, and he'll just pop out and take the kids to school while she stays home and plays with the ghosts that now fill the house. One of the ghosts manifests itself in the living room, a woman in white (Danielle Bisutti) who is interested in babysitting for the littlest Lambert (Brynn and Madison Bowie). In a misguided effort to create tension, in the middle of the encounter between Renai and the woman in white, the narrative flips over to Josh's mother (Barbara Hershey). She is consulting with Specks (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson), the worst sidekicks ever. They decide to call Present Day Carl (Steve Coulter) and he brings his bag of 'd6s' so they can all play Dungeons and Dragons. Except the dice aren't for roleplaying, they are for talking with dead people. The dead people they talk to tell them to go to Our Lady of Angels hospital. This leads us on a path down memory lane, as Lorraine retells the story of a patient, Parker Crane (Tom Fitzpatrick) who committed suicide. Since modern-day hospitals are routinely abandoned with medical records left behind in unsecured rooms, our heroes easily find the information they were sent there to find. Why the dead people didn't send them to the house they eventually end up in is unclear, since if dead people can send you to a hospital using dice why can't they spell out an address just as easily? It would have saved a lot of time. Overall, the second half of the film is more successful. The film made buckets of money and a third entry is scheduled. My biggest problem was the failure of Renai to investigate what happened to her husband by taking his picture. She knows the camera captures the image of the spirit, she knows that something killed Elise, she saw the camera lying on the floor and presumably checked out the image captured in the final moments of the first film — why doesn't she take her husband's picture? Now showing at Wynnsong HEATHER GRIFFITHS, Contributing 7, Carmike 12 and Carmike Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@upandMarket Fair 15. comingweekly.com. Thanks for your vote! 8 Years In 6 Years In A RowA Row •Best Indian Food •Best Vegetarian Restaurant ian Specializing in Vegetar around from Over 30 specialty beers the world! Bombay Bistro IN THE MORNING Weekdays 5:30AM to 10:00AM WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM 910.487.0020 5945 CLIFFDALE ROAD www.bombaybistronc.com OCTOBER 2-8, 2013 UCW 43