Annabelle: Creation (2017)
Directed by David F. Sandberg
Annabelle, I reviewed it a couple years ago. I thought the first one was meh, if we are being honest. I was and wasn’t surprised they made a sequel/prequel. It made a lot of money but at the same time the killer doll/haunted doll thing is so cliché and corny at this point that it is basically trope now. I was recently taking a business trip to Las Vegas and on the flight, they had monitors at every seat and you could watch movies. The only horror movie they had was Annabelle: Creation, and I had almost 4 hours to waste so yeah, I watched it lol.
Obviously, the movie is an origin story of the Annabelle doll. We see a small family in the early 40s. Mr. and Mrs. Mullins and their daughter Annabelle. One day their car breaks down and Mr. Mullins is working on the car on the side of the road. Mrs. Mullins and Annabelle come out to see what’s wrong and Mr. Mullins drops a lug nut, Annabelle runs out into the street to grab it and she’s hit by a car and dies. Next, we flash ahead 12 years later and Mr. Mullins has opened his huge house to a group of orphaned girls. There is one room in the house they’re not allowed into, but of course one goes in and thus lets the infamous Annabelle doll out of its secure location. The doll quickly begins terrorizing the girl and possesses her. We later find out that the Mullins’s struck with grief due to the death of their daughter, start seeing visions of their daughter around the house and the demon causing these illusions takes possession of the doll. Quickly Mr. Mullins has the doll locked in a closet that is lined with bible verses and is blessed by a priest. The new girls have to fight to survive the evil presence and keep it from destroying others.
The acting is this movie really isn’t that bad. I was kind of surprised, with a cast of mostly young girls, they all do a fairly good job. Mr. Mullins is kind of flat, but dealing with all he has had to deal with, you can kind of see why. Mrs. Mullins is scarred and emotionally damaged by the death of Annabelle and an encounter with the demon. You begin to develop feelings for the main girl Janice, played by Talitha Bateman. She does a great job as an innocent yet wise young girl. What is kind of shitty though is that she quickly goes from an interesting character to the typical possessed young girl cliché in every possession type movie.
The special effects are decent, the doll and demon look believable enough. There isn’t much to say in this sense. The scenery is great and the atmosphere is creepy at times. The kills are nothing too intense or original but they work with the movie as a whole. There isn’t much in the way of creative camera shots, but this type of movie really doesn’t warrant any in my mind. The demon looked way creepier than the one from Insidious aka Darth Maul’s cousin, but it still he looked a little cartoony.
I’m just kind of over the whole possession/paranormal movie scene. I enjoyed Insidious and the Conjuring movies but they just aren’t my bag as a whole. They all seem to be the same to me, and I guess since Annabelle is part of the Conjuring universe, that would explain some of it. This was by far better than the first Annabelle, but still left some be to be desired for me. Again I’m not a huge fan of the subgenre so my thoughts may be biased. I would give Annabelle Creation a B-, again it is better than the first one (which is rare honestly) but still not something I’d watch more than one or two times. It did help my flight go along faster, so I wont complain.
