Creepy spirits in old-timey dress, ear-stabbing sound cues, slamming doors and bloody handprints: The horror flick “Insidious” isn’t scared to be trite.
A young couple (Rose Byrne, Patrick Wilson) are raising three children in a haunted house when one of the kids is suddenly cast into a coma while creepy stuff happens at night. Dad scoffs, Mom calls the movers. Their second house turns out to be haunted, too, but not for any interesting reason.
A pair of dorky ghostbusters and a medium arrive, seances are set up, and soon we’re traveling into another dimension known as “the Further,” a sort of funhouse of plagiarism featuring such frighteningly ripped-off images as two matched little girls and a guy with really long, sharpened fingernails.
The lair of all these evilmongers is bathed with enough dry ice to furnish three “Phantom of the Opera” road companies. No effort is made to explain how the back stories of these figures cohere, much less reflect on the protagonists back in the real world.
This reasonably serviceable mishmash of cheap thrills from “Poltergeist,” “The Amityville Horror,” “The Exorcist,” etc., comes from the writer and director of “Saw,” who have evidently seen a lot of horror movies. So have I, gentlemen. So has everyone.