Insidious 2: A Gentleman’s Recollection

Life at the estate can be difficult at times. I swear if I have to tell those rascal servants one more time that desert forks are pointed to the RIGHT, I’ll just throw a fit. And can you believe the ridiculous prices the government is forcing us to pay the help these days? Five pence an hour for a stable boy?! That’s obscene! If I’m forced to pay those types of wages, then I shan’t be able to afford the shipment of escargot I have delivered from France every week. Obama is ruining this country I say! My doctor, Sir Reginald S. Lavishwhiskers, insists that I take time during the day for tea party breaks. And I do say, a quick 3 hour tea break has done wonders for my stress. Even my many servants say I am much more amiable. I’m only averaging about three servants beaten for insolence a week, which has been helpful for the carpal tunnel I developed writing these strenuous reviews.

One evening I heard at the brothel…I mean, “tea party,” that a picture magician named James Wan and his penwrite Leigh Whannell had been delighting at court and, wanting to keep the most fashionable of company, I decided to have them over. With them they brought their traveling group of minstrels Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Ty Simpkins, and Lyn Shaye. Together over tea and biscuits they performed their play called Insidious (2010) or some rubbish like that. They were a ragged, cheap looking bunch, but I dare say the whole act was rather a delightful fright! I soiled myself on many occasions, which is okay because my undergarment servant, was on hand to change, powder, and fluff me after each time.

I enjoyed their company so much that I had them over again three years later when I heard they we back in court. But the problem with these poor commoners is that once you give them a few niceties from the superior upper class, they’ll then want to bring all their boring family members with them for a bite as well. And this is precisely the problem with Sir James Wan’s sequel Insidious: Chapter 2.

Wan returns with his favorite poet-boy Whannel, who crafts a story that is full of frights, mystery, and mildly amusing twists. Wan has also returned to us his favorite troupe of actors, who do their job just diligently enough not to have my hounds set upon them. But he also had the ghastly gall to invite his dreadfully boring uncle (Steve Coulter) and grandmother (Danielle Bisutti)—who, despite her sleep-inducing character and overdone makeup, was sent for to warm my bedchamber later—to my dinner table without asking permission, which did get the hounds set upon them.

I shouldn’t heap too much scorn on these two poor vagrants, as a large part of their being presentable at my table falls into the hands of their benefactors Wan and Whannell. In the first minstrel show the grandmother was a horrid, macabre creature that pleased me to no end. Whereas the former was a gloriously heinous and intriguing to look upon, the latter was rather a moderately cute sight to behold, but with make up that was more tacky than terrifying. Just the site of her induced a yawn upon me.

When Wan first held court he introduced a marvelously spunky old wench (Shaye) who claimed to be some sort of master of the dark arts. She was kind enough to help our poor characters fight the demonic evil that plagued them as well as provide a spark to the stage with her biting wit and zest for the afterlife. While she does make a rather forced entry much too late in the movie to save it, in her stead is a sniveling little ne’er do well character named Carl (Coulter).

While I am sure this appropriately feeble looking actor played the part he was asked as best he could, my question is why I was forced to bare this insufferably drab character at my tea table. Instead of the delightful old strumpet who used grotesquely fascinating gas masks to communicate with the dead, I’m forced to sit at the head of my table and watch old man Carl play the oldest of old people games, called Word Dice (otherwise known as scrabble for poor people) to contact the beyond. Wan and Whannel seem to go out of their way to show me how feeble and unremarkable he is to the point that I half began to think some sort of marvelous redemption scene was in order for him, but alas, old Carl was as spectacularly useless and uninteresting after my tenth cup of spiked tea as he was during the first. Had the poor loaf not looked so feeble I might have had him sent to my wild boar pen, but I don’t think he would have been enough to feed even one of them. Shame. Maybe then his character could have provided some kind of entertainment.

On top of these miserable characters the story is muddled with boring meet-and-greet scenes that slow the story down, as well as seem cheap and insincere, and there is nothing that irks me more than insincerity and cheapness. And oh god the ending. Where the last show involved a thrilling escape from a ghoulish devil-demon and a shocking twist murder, this involved a final 2 second fight between two grandmothers and a balding thirty-something-year-old getting beaten up by his tiny house wife. I haven’t seen anything more anticlimactic since my on-again-off-again affair with my mistress Paris Hilton.

So now I’m all in a huff. Where is my undergarment servant? I need fresh cloth and a good powdering or I shant be merry again for the rest of the evening! By all means go invite these mongrels to your dining table, but don’t blame me when the whole ordeal seems like a waste of money and your friends begin to snicker behind your back about the company you keep. And by god where is that damned undergarment servant!