Spooky doll.

It’s been a good two years since I started catching up on the Conjuring series, enough time for The Nun to get a sequel and for my anticipated Crooked Man movie to get shitcanned. Everything leads to disappointment. There are eight films in the Conjuring franchise now and I figure at this rate I’ll be able to get through all of them by the time I die at a ripe old age of 44 in 2033.

Annabelle actually came out between The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2, but I didn’t watch it because it wasn’t on subscribed streaming at the time I watched those other two films. Now it’s on HBO Max as is most of the franchise so I figured why not. I’m not going to watch Wolves at the Door and I’ve already seen The Curse of La Llorona, neither of which are actually tied to the franchise officially. Curse wasn’t fantastic.

Directed by John R. Leonetti, a career cinematographer who HBN readers may recognize from his work on the Mortal Kombat films (the 90s duology), Joe Dirt, The Scorpion King, Child’s Play 3, and Insidious 1 and 2, among others. Annabelle ironically stars Annabelle Wallis as Mia and her husband John played by Ward Horton, a pregnant couple who own a creepy doll. Horton hears a murder, as the couple goes next door to find their neighbors brutally murdered by their daughter Annabelle and some dude. Mia and John just barely survive being attacked by the duo, and decide to throw away the creepy doll and move to a different place.

The funniest distinction between real life and the movie is that in real life the Annabelle doll is just a normal Raggedy Anne doll. Someone might ask why a family would buy a doll that looks like the Annabelle doll, and that’s quite a way of showing you didn’t have a babushka in your family growing up. Girls from a certain era loved dolls that by today’s standards look like they come prepackaged with a starving Victorian-era child’s soul inside them. They weren’t considered creepy back then.

I will also note that I can respect the film for not going down the obvious route, and I’m specifically talking about the scene where Annabelle’s blood drips in the doll’s eye and you think maybe that’s how the doll became possessed. By Annabelle’s soul. But it’s not. As with The Conjuring, I do enjoy the constant subversion of expectations when you think the film is going to do something stupid but then it doesn’t.

One aspect of the Conjuring universe films that I’ve really enjoyed so far is how much dignity the films present the spoopies with. It does get a little annoying when the cinematographers go well out of their way to focus on shots that blatantly set up a corny scare only for the director to say sike, and cut away just to prove he didn’t go for the low hanging fruit. It’s impressive the first few times they do it, but then it becomes self-congratulatory and kinda obnoxious. It’d be less annoying if they didn’t stick on those shots for so long even after the first three times they do it.

Until the film goes absolutely insane in the last fifteen minutes and just decides to toss in every stereotype possible.

The one thing I can really criticize about this film is the camera placement. You can tell they really wanted to do the whole security camera setup from films like Paranormal Activity, but the film is set in 1967 and those don’t exist yet. So the camera just randomly goes into security camera mode anyway, capturing the scene like it’s physically mounted on the wall in the movie universe. It’s not a big problem but it was distracting.

I’m going to watch the films in release order going forward, so the next one is…Annabelle: Creation. Can’t wait.

Rating: A-