Review: Insidious: The Red Door

Image courtesy of Screen Gems.

Star Patrick Wilson steps into the director's chair for this final - well, allegedly - chapter of the "Insidious" saga, at least the story involving the Lambert family. There are a few choice scares and a father-son bonding story that make the sequel at least a little more interesting than your typical entry in a horror series that's been going on for more than a decade.

However, "Insidious: The Red Door" is mostly just a mediocre exercise in the type of horror movie tactics that we've seen time and again - jump scares, slowly approaching and unsettling objects, and people taking part in foolish behavior for the purpose of putting them in harm's way when any normal person's instinct would be to run like hell.

The film picks up a decade after the previous "Insidious" entry featuring the Lambert family. Since then, Josh Lambert (Wilson) and his son, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), now a brooding teenager about to go off to college, have been hypnotized so that they don't recall that they have the ability to astrally project into an evil region known as The Further, and they've forgotten all the trauma that their family endured.

As the film's opens, Josh's mother has died, and Josh still looks back in anger at the father whom he believes has abandoned him. He has since gotten a divorce from Renai (Rose Byrne), and the couple's kids live with her. In an attempt to reconnect with Dalton, who's an aspiring artist, Josh offers to go on a road trip to drop him off at his first semester in college.

The trip doesn't go too well, and no sooner has Dalton been left to his own devices, things start to get weird. But first, Dalton finds out that his college roommate is a young woman named Chris (Sinclair Daniel), whom he befriends, although the concept that a university would house - unbeknownst to them - a young freshman man and young freshman woman together is, perhaps, the film's biggest stretch of the imagination.

In an art class, a teacher counts backwards from 10 to get her students to use their memories to paint something personal, and Dalton's resulting work is a painting of a red door, which then sets things into motion. As his memories flood back - and Josh simultaneously starts having strange visions - Dalton recalls how he can astrally project, and he heads back into The Further.

There are a few decent scares here - including one particularly nerve-wracking one at a frat party and another in which Josh can't see an approaching figure through the windows of his home - but "The Red Door" mostly relies on cheap jump scare tactics and brief flashes of the demon that made such a shocking appearance in the original "Insidious."

The first film in the series was a legitimately frightening and original horror film, one of the best of the genre from the era in which it was released. Since then, there have been two sequels to the original and two prequels, none of which were nearly as frightening or as compelling as the original. I'll give Wilson points for trying to turn the finale into a family drama involving an estranged son and father, but ultimately this is a series that ran out of juice a while back.