Let the Right Wan In:THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO ITand MALIGNANT

Two recent Warner Brothers’ horror movies have been a case study in James Wan’s talents as a director. Maybe the clearest example of what he can do is the one he didn’t do, proof through absence, since The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is a sequel to two movies he directed. After Saw and Insidious, he launched The Conjurings. The series starring Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as paranormal investigators, loosely based on real people who claimed they were such a thing, had a good start. It also made him one of a select group of directors who’ve kickstarted three iconic horror franchises. Wan gave it style and character, long slow build ups to good ghost scares and in between the great actors were allowed to build warm chemistry for a portrait of a loving marriage. It satisfied, and made a whole cinematic universe of spin-offs in which other directors tackled the story of haunted objects largely disconnected from the central Conjurings, and therefore freed from the direct comparison with the flagship’s style and tone. (Even the ones that featured good cameos from Wilson and Farmiga, like a third Annabelle movie about a possessed doll, managed to do fun creep-outs with its ideas without stepping on the larger franchise.) What a disappointment, then, that the third in the central series is such a slack and boring affair.

Wan passed the reins to Michael Chaves, whose modestly effective The Curse of La Llorona was the least connected in the Conjuring-verse. (It was also, coincidentally, the second-best film of that Latin American folk tale in recent years.) With this new movie, he makes a competently framed sequel, but the screenplay is just so weak that it hardly matters he can do the sliding digitally-assisted camera moves and gin up some token suspense. Instead of the haunted house tours of the prior films, this one feints toward the idea of being a legal thriller. There’s a grisly murder, and the main suspect tells his lawyer that the devil made him do it—hence the title. So Wilson and Farmiga, taking this very seriously because the alleged murderer was a witness at one of their exorcisms lately, tromp off to investigate. Weirdly, the courthouse is left entirely behind so that they can snoop around secret Satanists and ferret out a conspiracy of evildoers lurking in the shadows. (Maybe because the “true story” would find a judge dismiss the defendant’s claim of possession and lock him up, the filmmakers needed something more supernatural to happen.) Its 80s setting places it squarely in Satanic Panic territory, a time when a frenzy of right-wing Christian scaremongering about phony devil-worshipping cabals led to false accusations against all manner of teachers, parents, and childcare workers. (n+1 editor Richard Beck’s 2015 book We Believe the Children is a well-researched overview of this history.) So it’s certainly more difficult to take the series’ fake “true story” claims in good fun when it’s now pretending this damaging falsehood might’ve had a point, even in such a limited case. Even if I could get past that, though, the movie itself is mechanical and dry, self-seriousness tipped fatally toward silly, with its good leads stranded in a plot that plods. I was thoroughly bored.

That’s not to say the movie Wan did direct, Malignant, is any less silly, but it owns it. The thing is so committed to its kookiness it reaches a fever pitch of style and confidence. The thing starts overheated and maintains a roiling boil from there. After some spasms of plot-setting, we arrive in the life of a woman (Annabelle Wallis) who, recuperating from having her skull cracked against a wall by her abusive husband, dreams he’s killed. She awakes to discover he was. From there it’s a not unfamiliar story of its kind, as the woman imagines herself present at more and more grisly murders—bodies torn apart with gross effects for gooey stabbings. The police view her suspiciously. Her sister tries to be supportive. It all ramps up until there’s a huge twist or three, and the movie adds a kind of manic glee to its increasingly wild images. Wan starts with the show-off overhead shots and gliding through walls he so loves. But the dialogue seems a little too flat, and the acting seems all dialed a bit off from the norm. The investigation is sluggish, and the psychology half-baked. The thing starts to feel strikingly composed—with dark and stormy nights and color filters and self-consciously posed blocking—but bog standard. It’s maybe the awkward halfway point between Dario Argento’s excess and M. Night Shyamalan’s earnestness for a while.

But by the time a stunt person, makeup, and wriggling gross-out body horror erupts into spasms of mind-boggling action and violence in pursuit of an amped up high concept giddily displayed, it’s hard not to get on board. I could appreciate the whole project then. It started by showing us a deceptively normal (in genre terms) idea, the better to satisfy when it reveals its extreme grotesqueries from the other side, an awkward but not unenjoyable mix. Wan isn’t pursuing the virtuosic symphonies of jump scares and spectral visions he brought to his ghost stories, or the twisting suspense gore of his earlier works. Instead he’s in pursuit of just how far over the top he can take a concept while still playing it straight. Does that make it a good movie? Maybe not quite. But it makes it a watchable and memorable one with a few fun sequences. It’s certainly the superior Wan production of the year. It strikes me as the kind of outlier horror movie best appreciated for what it’s trying, and admiring what it can pull off.

Dead on Arrival: THE MUMMY

Every few years, Universal decides to do something with its roster of classic monster movies – Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and so on – beyond rereleasing the original 30’s and 40’s films on whatever new home video format has arisen since the last time. Lately that means we get 2010’s Wolf Man and 2013’s Dracula Untold, attempts to make new effects pictures out of the old creatures, and maybe even spark a new franchise along the way. Now this had led to The Mummy, the newest attempt to make a whole monster mash adventure series on the solid foundation of hoary old horror tropes. Hey, it worked in 1999 when Brendan Fraser headlined a charming, good old-fashioned Indiana Jonesy period piece action serial about dodging undead Egyptians and their various mythological curses. This time around, in addition to some archeological creepiness the premise requires, director and co-writer Alex Kurtzman (who has had a hand in screenplays for a half-dozen franchises) makes a picture that is a modern Tom Cruise movie, which means it’s at least as interested in hurtling action as it is any simmering supernatural suspense. The movie opens on the star fighting ISIS for control of an ancient Mesopotamian burial site where evil incarnate waits hidden beneath a pool of liquid mercury. Once out, the long-dormant mummified witch (Sofia Boutella, an acrobatic and comitted highlight) will inevitably unleash havoc. That’s enough for a good time, at least until the whole enterprise – growing thinner and duller by the sequence – thoroughly wears out its welcome well before the finish line. And they want to make more of these? Hopefully they’ll be improving as they go.

The main problem with this movie – which has a grinding workmanlike competence to the expected pattern of hectic, noisy collisions of conflict punctuated by droopy exposition spouted by famous faces – is how schematic it is. You can see all too transparently the contract negotiations, marketing decisions, franchise planning, and formulaic plotting on screen. It gives Cruise reasons to take off running from explosions, get into rollover accidents, and smirk at his colleagues before getting likably pummeled. It also has Russell Crowe show up and call him a young man, despite Cruise being two years older (a neat showbiz trick). Crowe is here playing Dr. Jekyll, a clear tip of the hat to a brewing monster meetup in the planned future installments, what with his laboratory with Creature from the Black Lagoon flippers and vampire skulls floating in specimen jars. The film also gives Cruise his usual bantering love interest/professional rival (Annabelle Wallis) and comedic sidekick (Jake Johnson). The script never successfully turns all this into real characters or clear motivations or easily comprehendible MacGuffins, settling for just moderately diverting nonsense and the inexorable pull of blockbuster spectacle sequence-hopping logic. There’s no sense of escalation or danger or invention, just dutifully hitting the marks. 

A constant churn of action works in the exceedingly excellent Mission: Impossible series (probably the most consistent franchise Hollywood currently has running), but those movies use Cruise’s hardworking, hard-charging action demeanor in a series of escalating and cleverly deployed stunts and creatively twisty heist plots. Here it’s just lumpy, car chases and plane crashes and shootouts and howling effects jolting a half-hearted Mummy-stalking feature into the shape of a generic summer movie. In the context of a theoretically spooky monster movie, dripping with zombies and ancient curses and a “who-is-possessed-and-unwittingly-prepared-to-channel-an-evil-Egyptian-god?” plot engine, it starts to feel like two competing ideas smashed unsuccessfully into one. The better idea is the Cruise vehicle, where his charisma and star power can carry along a thin character, and his effortlessly effortful forward momentum can paper over leaps of logic and plot holes big enough a supernatural sandstorm can be seen through them. The lesser idea, alas, is the one that wins out in the end, weakly hitting rote monster beats while hedging its bets, teasing future story and failing to live in the moment long enough to give us a movie worth watching in the here and now. There’s just barely enough for an only mildly disappointing brainless night at the movies, but it’s certainly not enough to crave more.