Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga return, but the scares are recycled and the story drags on for more than two hours.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Devout Catholic, ghost-busting demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) are back for a possibly final (don’t bet on it) confrontation with the devil and his legions.
But first we get a flashback to a 1964 case, featuring freakishly (and presumably inexpensively de-aged-by-young-lookalikes) Ed (Orion Smith) and Lorraine (Madison Lawlor), involving a troubled antiques dealer who hangs himself, his daughter, who says “something is calling to” her (Is it Cthulhu?), and a dark-framed mirror with bas relief faces staring back at whoever gazes into it.
It’s hellish, but not as hellish as two hours and 15 minutes of mediocre dialogue (“There’s something in the attic.” Really.) from six credited screenwriters and bits lifted frequently from Toby Hooper’s 1982 classic “Poltergeist,” another film about a nuclear family trapped in a haunted house. I know these“Conjuring” films have spawned a universe, including the offshoot “Annabelle” and “Nun” series, and are supposedly based on a true story. But Ed and Lorraine are also dead ringers for Steve (Craig Nelson) and Diane Freeling (JoBeth Williams), the devoted parents whose only goal is to protect their children from ghosts and demons from movies that scared Steven Spielberg when he was growing up.
In the flashback opening, Lorraine gives birth in a delivery room equipped with a ceiling-crawling demon. The baby is named Judy and grows up in a dopey montage. Unfortunately, little Judy sees things, and we know exactly what sort of things. The scares in “The Conjuring: Last Rites” are almost all jump cuts. Director Michael Chaves (“The Nun II,” “The Curse of La Llorona”) is nothing if not consistent. Nicely re-aged Ed and Lorraine (Wilson and Farmiga again) have problems beyond a daughter who sees (mostly grotesquely old) dead people. On one level, “Last Rites” is the Millennials bidding farewell to their Boomer grandparents by transforming them into demonic ghosts. Sweet.
We know it’s 1986 because someone just fired up The Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary.” Heather Elizabeth Smurl (a quite good Kila Lord Cassidy) receives Confirmation, and as a gift, her grandparents give her that hellish mirror from the flashback that they bought at a “swap meet.” Thanks, Grans. You suck.
Eight Smurls live in their smallish, haunted house in West Pittston, Penn., cowering beneath a poison-spewing nearby refinery: two adolescent girls, a tweener, a toddler, two venerable in-laws and father Jack (Elliot Cowan) and mother Janet (Rebecca Calder). This film was shot in the U.K. because it’s currently cheaper to shoot outside the U.S. Most of the supporting cast are British actors.
At a poorly attended lecture (again, budget), Ed complains to a few college students that his life is going to end up being “an SNL skit.” I think it’s more likely to end up as a TV sitcom like “Ghosts.” The toddler has a creepy, mechanical, full-sized baby doll that talks and crawls. Mother Janet spends a lot of time in a basement that begins to smoke when Father Gordon (Steve Coulter) sprinkles holy water on it. After disposing of the mirror, Dawn Smurl (Beau Gadsdon) chokes and pukes a gallon of blood and shards of mirrored glass into the sink. Tony (Ben Hardy), the ex-cop who wants to marry Judy (Mia Tomlinson) despite the dead people she sees, drives an SS Chevelle El Camino (more than $ 50,000 on the market today), which turns out to be the only cool thing about him. Ed’s kind of cool, too. He’s got a 1960s Triumph twin motorcycle stored beside the ping-pong table in the garage. At a fitting for her wedding dress, Judy gets trapped inside a mirrored room and things get…mirrory. People keep getting shoved down flights of stairs. In the style of “The Omen” films, a priest harms himself.
Chaves invokes one of the most famous shots from “The Shining” just for the hell of it. Lili Taylor (“The Conjuring”) and Frances O’Connor (“The Conjuring 2”) show up for Judy’s wedding. If you struggle to distinguish between the “Conjuring” films and the “Insidious” ones, also created by James Wan and featuring Wilson as a father battling supernatural forces to protect children, you are not alone. “Something feels different,” remarks Ed Warren. No, Ed, it all feels the same. Boo.
‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’
Rating: R for bloody/violent content and terror.
Cast: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Elliot Cowan
Director: Michael Chaves
Writer: Ian Goldberg, Richard Naing, David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and more
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Where to Watch: in theaters
Grade: C
Boston Movie News 