Insidious: The Last Key marks the fourth installment of this series and like the title suggests, let’s hope it’s the last. Although I doubt it.
It once again stars Lin Shaye as Elise Rainier, the parapsychologist who takes on a new investigation and this one is personal. It’s her own childhood home. You know it’s personal when evil spirits want to haunt the last place you want to go back to considering it’s filled with traumatic childhood memories inflicted, not by ghosts, but by her own father.
Elise is initially reluctant due to the dire circumstances that have plagued her for most of her life. She eventually takes the case, but not alone. She takes along her own ghost busters (Angus Sampson and Leigh Whannell) who provide both the comic relief and some tools to get the job done and as characters, they fail at both.
Another inner demon Elise has to contend with is her relationship with her estranged brother Christian. As kids, Elise ran away from home leaving Christian to fend for himself against their tyrannical father. Bruce Davison is the adult Christian who wants no part of her and that includes introducing her to his daughters (Caitlin Gerard and Spencer Locke).
There’s very little that comes off as scary or creepy. Instead we can see each time when a jump scare will take place and the plot has too many threads to keep it coherent. By the end, I didn’t care who was doing what or when.
Only fans of the first three will be interested and then they’ll only analyze it so they can complain about where it went wrong.
Last year around this time, Underworld: Blood Wars came out and I had already declared it as one of the year’s worst films. Suddenly I’m having the strangest feeling of Deja Vu.
Grade: C-
(Rated PG-13 for disturbing thematic content, violence and terror, and brief strong language.)
