At the start of “Insidious: Chapter 2,” a young woman opens her mouth to speak and someone else’s voice comes out of her. Demonic possession?
Nope, just some inexplicab🌄le dubbing to kick off this clunker of a horror sequel: The husky voice of actress Lin Sha⭕ye is quite obviously superimposed on a 20-something playing a younger version of her character. Why? Who cares?
It won’t be the last time these queries come up. I rather liked James Wan’s original, occasionally silly “Insidious” — its creepy use of Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” still haunts me. But this is one of the more pointless follow-ups ever, just an assortment of scary-movie tropes randomly doled out, with unavoidable jolts at regular intervals. Its main inspiration seems to be those YouTube prank videos wherein a seemingly placid scene is cut short by a ghoul screaming in your face.
We begin where the last film left off: Having just rescued their young son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) from the clutches of the “spirit realm,” parents Renai (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Patrick Wilson) Lambert are dealing with the strangling death of Elise (Shaye), the medium who helped get him back. We know from the first movie that a possessed Josh was the killer, but Renai doesn’t.
Straightaway, cliched supernatural antics start up again. The piano plays on its own, baby toys throw themselves around — then a shrieky ghost woman just ups and punches Renai in the face, hilariously belying Josh’s advice that “all you have to do is ignore them and they’ll go away.” Dalton, meanwhile, is perhaps not totally recovered, as he’s having tin-can-telephone conversations with a shadowy presence in the closet.
A question: Has no one in this film heard of WD-40? Every door, without exception, creaks. This is a typical feature of the “Scooby Doo”-derivative plotting, which sees a team of supernatural experts (Steve Coulter, Angus Sampson and screenwriter Leigh Whannell) — and Barbara Hershey as Josh’s long-suffering mother — traipsing from seance to abandoned hospital to haunted house as they track down an Old Man Withers type (Tom Fitzpatrick) who may be the key to solving the Lamberts’ troubles.
Logic reaches its low point when, after discovering a room is full of corpses, the intrepid inv♛estigators make their real find in the corner: a trunk full of damning newspaper clippings. Huh?
As game as he is, the capable Wilson should maybe give the horror movies (he was also in this summer’s “The Conjuring”) a rest. Even he looks a little bored by the time he ends up back in the spirit realm, which resembles a high school play that went too heavy on the dry ice.
A small amount of comic relief is provided by Whannell and Sampson, reprising their roles as the late medium Elise’s snarky sidekicks Specs and Tucker; their juxtaposition of quippy and terrified is the only enjoyable thing about this sequel. I’d like to see Whannell pen the two of them a spin-off about these hipster ghost hunters — “Insidious 3: Williamsburg.”