Who ya gonna call? Elise Rainier in cheesy 'Insidious' horror prequel
“Insidious: The Last Key” - ★ ★ ★
This time, it's really personal.
After helping other people deal with malevolent spirits in the first three “Insidious” horror films, parapsychologist Elise Rainier (veteran actress Lin Shaye) discovers you really can go home again. Even if it is to deal with the demons of your past.
For decades, the first week in January and the last week in August had been designated as dead zones, time frames in which less worthy movies - many of them badly made horror tales - would go to languish and die slow commercial deaths.
Here's a surprise: The prequel “Insidious: The Last Key” proves to be the happy and scary exception.
That cheap old exploitation device known as the “jump-scare” has long been a staple of the “Insidious” series. Here, new director Adam Robitel and series writer/star Leigh Whannell fine-tune the art of the jump-scare by strategically executing the jolts microseconds before or after we expect them.
Plus, Whannell loads his screenplay with juicy subplots involving the horrors of child abuse, a mother-daughter bond that transcends death, a lifelong sibling hatred that feeds the demon who took their mother, and a particularly nasty demon with skeleton keys for its finger tips. (The movie poster doesn't lie.)
Deliberately and knowingly cheesy, “The Last Key” keeps our expectations low and fulfillable, letting shadowy ambience and Joseph Bishara's ominous, but not overpowering score keep us constantly on edge.
When a man named Ted (Kirk Acevedo) calls Elise for help with what appears to be a poltergeist, she agrees to help. Until she receives his New Mexico address.
It's the house where she grew up. The place where her drunkard father (Josh Stewart) beat little Elise (Ava Kolker) for seeing supernatural visions. The place where Elise accidentally frees a demon, still active. The place where she abandons her frightened little brother Christian (Pierce Pope, later played as an adult by Bruce Davison).
Elise and her two goofy, nerdy assistants Specs and Tucker (reprised by Whannell and Angus Sampson) head off in their newly purchased spectral investigations mobile to engage in both a past- and present-tense adventure.
Shaye is now a semi-action star at 74. It's refreshing to see a genuine AARP character cast as the hero in a delightfully lowbrow horror tale starring the first real female Ghostbuster.
<b>Starring:</b> Lin Shaye, Leigh Whannell, Angus Sampson, Josh Stewart, Bruce Davison
<b>Directed by:</b> Adam Robitel
<b>Other:</b> A Universal Pictures release. Rated PG-13 for violence, language. 103 minutes