In-Substantial?

I checked out a couple of new movies this past weekend. One was the horror film Insidious. It stars Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne as a couple whose young son slips in a coma-like state shortly after they move into a creepy house. (If you've seen the trailer for the movie, then unfortunately, a minor mid-movie revelation about what's really going on has already been spoiled for you.)

The movie was a bit of a roller coaster ride... in the "is it going to be good or not?" sense. The opening title screams its way onto the screen with a ginormous font and a 100 decibel violin screech that basically declares a hokey movie is about to ensue. Fortunately, though, the movie then immediately moves into more sophisticated territory.

For the first hour, a tense script bolstered by solid acting performances manages to build a truly effective sense of dread. The movie delivers far more suspenseful scares than cheap camera-cut/music-sting scares. It's well on course to be the best horror movie released in quite some time.

Then, the movie "burns the snake." First, it abandons anything novel and new about its premise and slips into a pretty direct copying of the plot from Poltergeist. It loses the grounded-in-reality terror of a threatened child and swaps in the you-can't-relate danger of navigating the astral plane. And it stops earning its scares; it resorts to the cheap scare tactics that were laudably absent in the beginning.

The movie doesn't come off so badly that I would warn a horror fan against seeing it. Still, even a horror fan is likely to lament the way in which something with such promise took a wrong turn halfway through the journey. Overall, I'd call Insidious a B-. Worth catching on DVD, but probably only worth the theater trip if you really love scary movies.