2014 saw the release of Annabelle, a prequel/spinoff of the excellent period possession film The Conjuring. For those who don't recall, it was, as they say in Spanish-speaking countries, 'no muy beuno;' boring, uninterested, needlessly complicated and featuring only one, possibly two, effective and memorable scare scenes, it was unanimously decried as a fairly dull time. Well, it's three years later and Hollywood is so devoid of ideas we now have a prequel OF a prequel to deal with. However, could it be that's a good thing?
12 years after the tragic death of their daughter, dollmaker Samuel Mullins and his mysteriously bedridden wife open their improbably large house (in an improbably idyllic location) to several young girls and their nun caretaker from a shuttered orphanage. Janice, one of the youngest girl and stuck with a leg brace thanks to a recent polio outbreak, finds the normally-locked door of the daughter's room open and finds the doll we all now and love(?) inside a closet plastered with pages of the bible. She soon becomes the major target of a demonic force --is there any other kind of force in these movies?-- that wants her body and soul for its own purposes.
Director David F. (Lights Out) Sandberg lends the film the tension and suspense that was desperately needed in the first Annabelle film, and while there's nothing here you really haven't seen before (this WAS written by Gary Dauberman, after all), the script had a nice amount of character and eccentricity that makes it feel less like a studio flick and more like something the people involved actually gave a shit about. Sure it feels a bit padded at times and the "twist" ending is contrived to the point your eyes might just roll right out of their sockets, but it's leaps and bounds better than the first film. Since they're written by the same person, let's hope the next Conjuring spinoff The Nun is of at least the same quality as this.
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