*** outta *****

3 outta 5

Insidious: The Last Key features all kinds of weirdly creepy visuals and a pretty solid performance by the main actress.  The movie stretches out the lead up to scares that it sort of loses steam because there’s only so much groping around in the dark in silence before loud noises until it becomes repetitive.  Still, there are some decent twists in here and a surprisingly compelling family melodrama that serves as a back story to the scares.  Last Key is not great but it has some cool stuff even if it is a bit of a drag.

Elise (Lin Shaye) is an elderly psychic who searches for demons that inhabit places with the help of her two sidekicks, Specs (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson).  When Elise receives a call from Ted (Kirk Acevedo) asking for help, she is shocked to discover he lives at her childhood home where she escaped an abusive father and torment by ghosts.  Hesitant but determined, she and her crew trek out to the house but, even in situations involving ghosts, things may not be what they seem. 

The best stuff is saved for the finale when things start getting twisty involving Elise and her family history tied in with monsters and possession and so forth.  It has a wee bit of The Shinning in there wherein the horrible actions of people may have been because they were possessed by demons, which is a standard trope.  Having a character smash a demonic apparition to overcome their own tortured personal history is a nifty trick of emotional catharsis that often happens in horror movies.   

To add some needless tension, and maybe because the filmmakers thought they needed younger counterparts, Elise meets her long lost nieces who also, not surprisingly, have psychic powers.  There’s Imogen (Caitlin Gerard) who is basically there to sort of look cute and project psychically into the monster-verse and her sister, Melissa (Spencer Locke) who gets attacked by a monster that has keys on its fingers in a freaky scene.  Some third act horror movie nonsense occurs like Melissa fleeing into her body on the astral plane but it’s all kind of zippy so it doesn’t matter. 

This is the 4^th film in the Insidious series and the 2^nd prequel to the original film.  While it’s placement in the series chronology may be confusing the film is a fairly straightforward affair, mostly concerned with Elise’s childhood trauma.  The few references to the previous films are ultimately needless.  Last Key’s closing minutes focus entirely on knotting continuity tight into the first film which doesn’t have much emotional resonance to this particular story. 

The tortured family history and traumatic childhood that Elise endured makes her immediately sympathetic as Shayne conveys a deep pain underneath her actions.  Opening with kid Elise and her encounters with monsters and her cruel father are effectively creepy.  The flashbacks involving Elise’s dad (Josh Stewart) are decent as Stewart shows a few different layers of overbearing abusiveness. Bruce Davidson pops up later on as Elise’s long lost brother and he does show that he has been hurt by her disappearance for decades since he was stuck with their insane father.  

The comedy sidekicks add bits of levity and most of their lines are sort of funny, even if pretty dopey.  Tucker is introduced setting up voice command light switches that he utterly fails at which isn’t exactly a sterling gag but Sampson sells it.  Whannell is the nerdy one because he’s wearing glasses and gets excited when he finds an old comic.  The sidekicks aren’t very exciting which is odd because Whannell is also the movie’s writer.  As the owner of Elise’s old house, Acevedo swings from blue collar guy all the way around to crazy. There are some decent twists where the line between ghostly apparition and real people is blurred as sometimes the movie will lead the audience into thinking they’re looking at a ghost but it’s a human instead. 

The direction by Adam Robitel is competent but uninspired.  What works best are odd moments like a monster hand reaching out from behind a door to grab a key, or when the key monster attacks it’s victims.  There isn’t much coherent logic in how the powers of the monster work but it gets a pass because it looks freaky.  The music by Joseph Bishara is the same piercing strings and high pitched squeal that is in every horror movie that is only effective because it’s mixed incredibly loud.  Bishara has also worked on Conjuring, other Insidious movies, and horror films so his scores all kind of mash together into a bland, indistinguishable gloop.  

Insidious: The Last Key is a competent piece of horror film making that may not offer anything new, it does throw a decent curveball every once in awhile.  Shaye is a good actress that makes the film more compelling that it should be.  Elise overcoming her personal demons by fighting real demons makes for a likeable heroine, even if the scares have been done before.