Editorials
[Review] ‘Annabelle’ Should Be Sent to the Island Of Misfit Toys
You’ll see a lot of love for creepy toy movies coming from me, it’s one of my guiltiest pleasures. I own all Puppet Master movies, Child’s Play, and you can probably guess my favorite segment from Trilogy of Terror. So, though not technically a “killer toy” movie I was really excited to see Annabelle.
This review does contain minor spoilers, please be cautious when reading.
Annabelle is a prequel/spinoff from James Wan’s spectacular haunted house movie, The Conjuring. The conceit behind this is a film set in the past, it starts off in 1969, and tells us about the origin story of the doll in question. At the start Annabelle is a very normal doll, in spite of her horrific look, who is gifted to Mia from her husband John because she is a collector. One night while the young couple is asleep they hear screams from the neighbors and discover they have been murdered. Mia is attacked in the house by the female killer who was actually their neighbor’s estranged daughter, Annabelle. Apparently Annabelle joined a satanic cult and was coming back to her parents to kill them and hopefully summon some sort of demon. The police arrive and shoot Annabelle’s boyfriend as she locks herself in Mia’s doll room clutching the creepy doll in her arms and kills herself. Her blood drips into devil Polly Pocket’s eye and we see a cryptic symbol drawn in blood above her.
Let’s be clear on one thing here, and it’s important: JAMES WAN DID NOT DIRECT THIS MOVIE!
Not one minute of this film was directed by Wan who has pretty much solidified his horror status with The Conjuring and Saw. Instead it’s directed by John R. Leonetti who directed such delights as The Butterfly Effect 2 and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. Leonetti also is a cinematographer by trade and has done a lot of work for Wan in the past, including Insidious and Dead Silence. Basically, Wan became good friends with Leonetti and threw him this movie to help him out after the cinematic disaster that was Butterfly Effect 2.
I realize that Annabelle was never meant to be a killer toy in the way Chucky or Blade were, which is sad because I could have gotten a lot more enjoyment from that. Instead we get a skeleton execution of an interesting and creepy idea. How do you make a movie with a doll that creepy and somehow manage to not make it scary in the least. Of course there are jump scares, the scariest of which being spoiled in the trailer, but they don’t even have near the effect caused in The Conjuring.
Annabelle is a very bland and generic take on a story like this. The leads, Annabelle (ironic) Wallis and Ward Horton certainly look the part of a middle class white couple living in the early 70s but other than that they don’t do much else to keep our attention. After a while they begin to just fade into the background, particularly Horton who conveniently is a Med School intern and is very rarely around for any of the demonic action that plagues Mia. Neither of them seem as nearly concerned as they should in life and both are far too easily taken in by the supernatural. If the characters believe it’s something spiritual right off the bat it robs the audience of scarier moments later on in the movie. Mia and John almost immediately agree it’s something evil and head straight to their priest.
The priest is just one of 3 characters in this film that go absolutely nowhere. At the beginning we meet him when he wants to take a picture of Mia and her new born baby. This would be a good, though clichéd, opportunity for a scare like the demon or ghost in the background, but nope. Just a weird thing this guy likes to do. And while we’re on the subject of the priest, he is extremely quick to agree with the couple that an exorcism must be performed on the doll. But if I remember right it took Regan’s mom months of tests and procedures before they decided to call in Father Merrin and this is about the same time period. I know because the early 70s are crammed down my eye sockets every 2 minutes. The movie even starts out with Mia watching news coverage on The Manson Family. I get it movie, we’re in the past and that would be great if the actual idea of a time period mattered but it doesn’t! It isn’t crucial to the plot, it could happen in any time, this one just so happens to fit into sequence with The Conjuring and Ed and Loraine Warren’s lives. Stop it with the references already, I kept expecting Don Draper to walk in.
My final gripe on Annabelle is its overly convenient plot devices. Mia and John just so happen to move next door to a couple whose daughter returns with a cult member and is just so happening to try and summon a demon and just so happens to conjure it into the world’s creepiest doll and on and on and on. There is even a character who falls under what Spike Lee famously termed “Magical Negro” who is sent to help out the white character because of their inside knowledge to what is going on. This archetype is both clichéd and insulting to audiences and filmmakers alike.
While Annabelle could have been a very creepy story with a lot of interesting mythology intertwined it instead gives us a mirage of potential. The best thing about Annabelle is it leaves off right as the story from The Conjuring begins. It sets it up perfectly to go into the next story about the nurses who had it, which means no sequel since we already were told that story!
Editorials
Five Serial Killer Horror Movies to Watch Before ‘Longlegs’
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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