Mike Hale Quotes

The suddenly frenetic action is matched by a riot of visual references to Japanese horror, Wes Craven and David Lynch, but the strongest analogue for the second half of “Insidious” is one that the filmmakers probably weren’t trying for: it feels like a less poetic version of an M. Night Shyamalan fairy tale. 

There are flashes of wit in the opening film-within-a-film-within-a-fi lm sequence, which uses bankable blondes like Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell as Ghostface fodder. And some later jokes, like a visual jab at the director Robert Rodriguez, are funny. Others...are just dumb.

But the central conceit of the characters’ fates being determined by the “rules” of horror movies feels irredeemably tired; a clever idea that was worth one movie.