The Conjuring

The Conjuring Last Rites was okay. It relied on The Warrens being the main characters at the expense of caring about The Smurl family. You gave a shit about the Hodgsons and the Perrons. Do you give a shit about the Smurls? No. The Warrens are supposed to be supplemental characters that are used to make us care enough and give us paternal advice, and help the family.

You will not care about the Smurl family in this film at all. There will be one good ghost, the other one sucks. The best is the ax man, a man that caught his wife cheating and went out of his mind. He is in like two or three scenes but he is the best part of the film. Possessed Judy felt like an Evil Dead throwback but it was the ax ghost that made this movie.

He had a sinister laugh that will stay with you long after the credits roll. The movie did something that I think was a nice attempt. They kept a lot of ghost scenes subtle but constant, but the first hour drags. We don't care about Mia Tomlinson's Judy, we care about Sterling Jerin's Judy, so concentrating on her and her fiance was risky and I did not give a shit about their marriage.

What saved the film for me was the appearance of Carolyn and Cindy Perron and Peggy Hodgson, and Janet Hodgson at the end wedding, Judy and Tony's. The cinematography felt like the second one a lot. It had homages to all three prior Conjuring films. Think the Halloween Ends of The Conjuring franchise, okay but wasted a lot of potential and had nuggets of ideas that a caring filmmaker could have made a better movie off of.

Knowing Jack and Janet and Dawn were actually molested by an incubus in real life, therefore, I expected one of the characters to get molested. Now, it makes sense they did not, but the real Andrea Perron said there was a bad male spirit in a house with five little girls.'' He smelled like rotting flesh and would drag the girls out of bed and watch them in the bathroom.

Especially when i saw the female spirit looking at Jack and choking him and levitated him I figured, ''here we go, the Incubus is going to have its way with Jack but it never did. There was unintentional comedy but that could have been fixed if we gave a shit about the SMurls. We spent way too much time focusing on Tony and Judy. Put that time in knowing the Smurls. Let us get to know them and the decline of that family unit. Hell, in the Haunted, a television movie based on that case, emphasizes how much the demon wanted to divide the family.

It was a throwaway line, and the main family was almost an afterthought. The Conjuring 4 could have been a lot better, but instead, it was okay. I mean the last half hour was where it felt like a horror film. There were little peripheral ghost moments but I felt like the ghosts had a lot more a plan in the first two Conjurings but they did not really care, they just showed up alot.

The first two had real heart and didn't have to bore us for an hour trying to force it. We could have gotten to know the Smurl family, you know,the ones being haunted. but we have to worry about faker Judy's love story. Mia Tomlinson did a serviceable job but we got to know and love Sterling jerins as Judy and so Mia felt distracting without being the true Judy in that cinematic universe.