Thoughts on the movie Insidious (SPOILERS)...and questions

I watched the other night and commented in another thread, but I am sort of disappointed tha tthere's not much being said about it. I guess not that many are watching it.

I thought the first hour was very well done as far as suspense and scare tactics. The part where that many with the ponytail is walking outside and Renai thinks that it might be Josh and then the fricker comes inside the room. That was pretty freaky. Then, when Renai sees the young boy running through the halls and jumps out the dresser...my heart almost stopped. The first hour had some great Paranormal Activity like moments.

The climax/turning point was cool, but not cool. I did not care for Elise and thought her character could have been played better and even by someone else. The Poltergeist rip-off (male/father to look for young male son, as opposed to female/mother looking for young female daughter) was evident with the two nerds and then the arrival of Elice. There was a bit too much wasted time on the meaning of 'Astral Projection'. The part, though, where Elise puts on the mask and dork #1 translates what she hears on the notepad...along with the spirits showing up was very freaky and topped out as perhaps the freakiest moment of the movie. After that, the movie got a little cartoonish and silly.

The "bad guy" aka "man with fire on his face" definitely had a chilling effect early on and that simply turned into "Really? This is supposed to be scary?" The one part that worked about the second hour was Josh traveling in his own house while he was asleep. The final minutes of the movie were pretty easy to guess.

Things that bothered me or what didn't work about film:

*Barbara Hershey was needed to play Josh's mother? Really? Was this a name to put into the cast in attempt for star points? She looks like a female Mickey Rourke with all of that plastic surgery. Her lines were cheesey and forced and she looked more like Josh's looney older sister than mother. No need in paying her to play that role. Nobody is going to go to a movie because Hershey is in it anyway.

*Ok, so did Renai have some sort of legit singing career? We knew she wrote songs and that she practiced at the piano...but was she a well-known artist or just a lover and hobbyist of it all? Irrelevant to the storyline, but makes her character very flat. All we know about her is that she's seeing crazy shite.

* Josh...he's a teacher. Great. We see him in his classroom with students for 20 seconds. What did he teach? Science? And he stays late to grade tests...as in 11:30 pm late. That's pretty silly and I guess him and Renai being very gray about their careers makes it also hard for me to understand how they could afford to buy a huge house like that with 3 kids. Yes, the house is old, but can't be cheap. A teacher's salary and what else pays for that and then later a brand new one (with quickness when she asked him to move for her)?

*Ok, who were the people that kept popping up with the evil grins and what was behind all that? Were these people who once lived in that house? Josh is traveling and he's downstairs and he sees one daughter pointing a gun (and fricking shooting it) at the others sitting on the couch. Were they haunted for a reason or just thrown in? If you're not following who I am talking about, the father or whoever he was sat on the couch whistling while holding up the newspaper. I mean, at first I thought this was going to be some sort of angle where they died inside the house, but the house wasn't haunted...Daulton was due to being succeptible to travlers.

*Why was the man with fire on his face sewing or molding/casting or whatever he was doing? How does he get an office like that?

*Who was the woman who was following Josh? Just a spirit looking to absorb a body (a parasite as Elise called her)? It would have been a sexier story had we had some sort of knowledge about her and who she was and how she died. The lady crying in the bedroom and the "bride" walking up the stairs...were these just all souls wandering around in "the Farther"? Too many ghosts and not enough answers for me.


All in all, I will give it 2.5/4 stars. It was very entertaining. It falls short of the film it mimiced in Poltergesit. It was much better than several of thse terrible, cheap-thrilled paranormal movies and exorcist rip-offs that have become as infiltrating as vampire garbage. It was scary, but silly and suspenseful, but predictable.