‘Insidious:
The Last Key’ is the fourth and perhaps final installment of the horror
franchise that had made over $370 million dollars at the worldwide box office
on a combined budget of just $18 million in the first three films. Conceived by director James Wan and
writer/producer/actor Leigh Whannell, who are no strangers to low-budget horror
(they also gave us the ‘Saw’ franchise), TLK is virtually guaranteed to turn a
healthy profit for its producers with its modest $10 million budget even as the
franchise runs out of steam and falls victim to diminishing returns.
Like
the much maligned ‘Insidious: Chapter 3,’ TLK is a prequel rather than a
sequel. With main stars Patrick Wilson
(now one-half of the even more successful ‘The Conjuring’ franchise along with
Vera Farmiga) and Rose Byrne out, TLK focuses on the paranormal
psychologist/demonologist Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) and the comic-relief
“ghost-hunting” duo of Specs (Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) as they
return to Elise’s childhood home to exorcise a malevolent supernatural entity
and in the process rescue her pretty young niece from the demon’s spindly
clutches in the ghostly dimension known as “The Further” (I guess “The
Beyond” sounds too cliché).
TLK
isn’t really all that scary or compelling for that matter, but that had more to
do with a more-of-the-sameness in this latest offering than anything else. While the franchise had arguably run its
course with ‘Insidious: Chapter 3,’ we can’t deny that there’s still an appetite
for this type of movies (a mixture of traditional western haunted house flicks
and oriental J-horror) and can hardly fault the producers for not turning down
such easy money.
Grade: C
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