Annabelle came out in 2014 right after The Conjuring was this massive hit and honestly this whole thing felt like Warner Brothers saw dollar signs and just rushed a spinoff out there to make some quick cash, the entire movie is about this young couple John and Mia who get this creepy looking doll as a gift and then these cult members break into there house one night, one of them bleeds all over the doll and boom now its possessed or whatever but heres the thing nothing really happens for like the first hour of this movie. You just get endless shots of the doll sitting there looking freaky and yeah sure the doll looks creepy as hell but that does not make a good scary movie, you need actual scares and tension and buildup and this movie just does not deliver any of that at all, the whole first half drags so damn much that I almost fell asleep watching it witch is not a good sign for a horror movie that is supposed to keep you on edge. The husband throws away the doll after the attack but then it magically shows up again in there moving boxes when they relocate to a new apartment and Mia just puts it back with her other dolls like nothing happened, I was sitting there thinking why the hell would you keep that thing after everything that went down but I guess the movie needed her to make dumb decisions so the plot could keep going.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3322940/
- Platform: PRIME VIDEO
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When scary stuff finaly starts happening its all the same tired horror crap we have seen a billion times before, doors closing on there own, weird noises down the hallway, the TV turning on by itself and Mia walking towards every creepy sound like she has never watched a single horror movie in her entire life. The demon shows up a few times and there is this one decent scene in the basement with the elevator that actually got me a little bit, the elevator keeps bringing her back down to the basement where she saw this demon thing standing in the corner and that part was kind of effective I will give it that, but by the time we get there you have already sat through like fifty minutes of absolutely nothing happening so its hard to really care anymore. The husband John is played by this actor who has zero emotion on his face the entire time and his performance is so wooden and dry that it brings down every scene he is in, even when his wife is telling him about all this supernatural shit happening he just stands there looking bored like he would rather be anywhere else and I do not blame him because I felt the same way watching this.
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The movie tries to build up this whole backstory about the cult called the Disciples of the Ram who are trying to summon demons and steal souls or whatever, they show news reports about the Manson Family murders to set the time period in 1967 but honestly most of the movie does not even look like the sixties at all it just looks like modern day California. Mia ends up meeting this bookstore owner lady named Evelyn who is played by Alfre Woodard and she is honestly the best part of the whole damn movie, she actually gives a shit about her performance and brings some real emotion to her scenes especially when she talks about losing her daughter in a car accident that she caused, that whole conversation between her and Mia was probably the only time I felt anything watching this because Woodard is a great actress and she elevates the material even though the script is pretty paint by numbers. Theres also this priest character Father Perez who tries to help them get rid of the doll and the demon literally just tackles him like a WWE wrestler and sends him flying backwards, I am not even kidding it looked so ridiculous that I started laughing because it reminded me of those over the top wrestling moves where someone gets speared out of nowhere.
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The ending is where everything falls apart even more because after spending the whole movie establishing that this demon wants the babys soul they suddenly switch it up and say no actually it wants Mias soul instead, so Mia decides she is going to jump out the window with the doll to sacrifice herself but then Evelyn shows up out of nowhere and jumps instead because I guess she felt guilty about her daughters death and wanted to atone for it or something. It happens so fast and feels so unearned that I just sat there confused about what the hell just happened, one minute Evelyn is giving Mia advice about demons and the next she is yeeting herself out a window to save a family she barely knows, the movie tries to make it feel emotional but it just comes off as lazy writing because they did not know how else to end the story without killing off the main characters. After Evelyn dies the doll just disappears and then we get this quick scene at the end showing one of the girls from the begining of The Conjuring buying the doll from an antique shop as a gift and thats it, roll credits and your sitting there thinking wait is that all we get after sitting through ninety minutes of boredom.
Looking back at Annabelle now its pretty wild that this thing made over 250 million dollars worldwide on a 6 million dollar budget because Warner Brothers knew people would show up just because of The Conjuring name, the director John Leonetti who also did the cinematography for The Conjuring clearly got this job because of that connection and not because he had any good horror movies under his belt considering he directed Mortal Kombat Annihilation witch is one of the worst sequels ever made. This whole movie feels like a cash grab that was rushed into production without anyone stopping to ask if we actually needed to know how the doll got possessed, the answer is no we did not need to know that because the mystery of it in The Conjuring was way scarier than whatever this tried to do, the cast is mostly forgettable except for Alfre Woodard who deserved a way better movie and Annabelle Wallis who plays Mia does an okay job when she is by herself but gets dragged down by her costar who has the charisma of a brick wall. The movie is not even about the three people who were interviewed about the doll in The Conjuring witch would have been way more interesting to see, instead we get this boring couple that has zero connection to anything and the doll barely does anything for most of the runtime, if your going to watch any Annabelle movie skip this one and go straight to Annabelle Creation because that one is actually good and fixes a lot of the problems this first one had. I would give Annabelle maybe a 4 out of 10 and thats me being generous, its not the worst horror movie I have ever seen but its definitely not worth your time when there are so many better options out there that will actually scare you instead of putting you to sleep.
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