Insidious: Chapter 2

    Beginning directly after the events of the first Insidious movie, The Lambert family is back in the real world, but Josh (Wilson) doesn’t quite seem himself.  As strange events start happening to them again, they get a little help from some ghost hunters and even a visitor from the other side in order to get things completely back to normal again.  

    I remember seeing the original Insidious back in 2011 but honestly, it felt so generic that I couldn’t even recall much of the premise or details.  Unfortunately here they don’t really do a good job of jogging your memory so I would highly advise watching it again before tackling this one.  Then again, I’m not sure it would make much of a difference since this one seems even more generic than the first.  At least the first one provided some decent chills (from what I can remember).  Chapter 2 turns out to be rather lame and too often filled with people making bad decisions in order to further the story.  The acting is okay but nothing that will blow you away.  

    The real problem might be the rating.  It’s hard to do PG-13 horror and here it feels like those handcuffs were a real distraction.  Considering Wan’s last film, The Conjuring, was R and much more effective, I can only assume his imagination was not allowed to run wild enough here.  That being said, I hate torture porn horror like what we’ve seen in his Saw franchise, but I also need my suspenseful scary movies to be scary and this one didn’t do it.