'Insidious' prequel more ho-hum than horrific

The horror prequel "Insidious: Chapter 3" is a simple origin story, laying out, in somewhat ho-hum fashion, the details of how everyone's second-favorite ghostbusters - steely spiritual medium Elise Rainier and her clownish sidekicks, known as Specs and Tucker - got together. Does anyone really care?

Leigh Whannell apparently thinks so. The writer of all three "Insidious" films - who also plays Specs - takes over the director's chair from horror maestro James Wan, moving Elise (Lin Shaye) and company a little bit more front and center. That's fine by me. Along with Shaye's supernatural exterminator, the characters of Specs and Tucker (Angus Sampson) were the best things about chapters 1 and 2, proving popular enough to spawn their own series of tie-in webisodes.

Set a few years before the haunting depicted in the original film, the third installment centers on a teenage girl (Stefanie Scott) who has been targeted by a new stalker from the afterlife, a realm known as "The Further." This restless etheric entity - referred to, in rather clinical fashion, as The Man Who Can't Breathe - is just what he sounds like: an old dude in a hospital gown with an oxygen mask.

I guess, to Whannell and his under-40 cohort, there is nothing scarier than the geriatric wing of a hospital.

Anyway, TMWCB haunts the apartment building where Quinn (Scott) lives with her widowed father (Dermot Mulroney) and little brother (Tate Berney), feeding off Quinn's soul, which he appears to nosh on, in nibbles. His half-finished meal is rendered, in one of the film's stupidest - and most literal-minded - visual effects, as Quinn's body without a face, and with a couple of extremities missing.

For no apparent reason, TMWCB also leaves oily footprints, which are there one minute and gone the next, whenever Whannell needs something to jolt the audience awake.

That's unfortunately often in this film, which is more silly and soporific than scary. It's just that the "Insidious" franchise, after three attempts to exorcise its real demons, still can't seem to shake what really haunts it: the ghost of B-movies past.