13 FOR HALLOWEEN #10: Wish Upon

What does it take to elevate a piece of genre boilerplate – or, in the case of tonight’s offering, a piece of teenie genre boilerplate – from an undemanding watch over a couple of glasses of wine to something that gets its very own review on The Agitation of the Mind?

Is it the way in which all the familiar tropes are laid out with the care and enjoyment of one who clearly loves the genre but hasn’t necessarily distinguished himself within it? (Step forward John R Leonetti of ‘Mortal Kombat: Annihilation’, ‘The Butterfly Effect 2’ and ‘Annabelle’ not-quite-fame.)

Is it the winning performance by a leading lady who gives her all and in doing so transcends a script chicaned with twists and turns that you can see coming like an aircraft carrier on a duckpond? (Step forward Joey King, who at the age of 19 has more acting credits to her name than most septuagenarians who have been in the business all their lives. Though, granted, most septuagenarians don’t have ‘Ramona and Beezus’ and ‘The Kissing Booth’ on their CVs.)

Or is it because it’s closing in on All Hallow’s Eve and your humble blogger needs to bash out the last few 13 For Halloween reviews pronto pronto?

A little bit of column A, a little of column B and a little bit of column C, as it turns out.

‘Wish Upon’ starts with a prepubescent Clare Shannon (Raegan Revord) go cycling off down a suburban street with a distinctly Haddenfield vibe, under the watchful eye of her mother Johanna (Elisabeth Rohm). Johanna’s just dumped a suspicious looking package in a bin and withdraws wearily into the house. By the time Clare reaches the end of the street and pedals back, Johanna has taken herself off to an upstairs room, thrown a rope over a ceiling beam and goodnight Vienna.

Fast forward a decade or so and Clare (King) is the unpopular white trash girl at the kind of high school that can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be in ‘Carrie’ or ‘Clueless’. Her best, indeed only, friends are June (Shannon Purser) and Meredith (Sydney Park) who are also outcasts (seemingly based on hair colour and skin colour respectively). Clare’s frustrated musician father Jonathan (Ryan Phillippe) makes a living foraging for scrap metal or resaleable items from peoples’ trash, kind of like a less phlegmy Albert Steptoe and HOLY FUCK, WHEN DID RYAN PHILLIPPE START PLAYING DAD ROLES? CHRIST ALMIGHTY, THAT MAKES ME FEEL OLD! Oh, and there's Sherilyn Fenn, the va-va-voom sex symbol of my adolescence, playing the kindly middle-aged neighbour, so just pass me my free fucking bus pass already.

I SAID Clare’s dad is a scrap merchant and one day he brings home a puzzle box for her that’s covered in Chinese ideograms. Long story short, the box grants her seven wishes. Small print: blood price required for wishes one to six, the owner’s soul in return for the seventh. And guess what, the blood prices are always paid by those closest to the owner.

So what we have is a melange of ‘Hellraiser’ (box that releases something unpleasant), ‘The Box’ (you get a good deal, someone else gets a truly shit one) and ‘Final Destination’ (in the way that ‘Wish Upon’ sets up its death scenes, most transparently in a roadside wheel change intercut with some business in an elevator), with a little bit of ‘The Babadook’ (the puzzle box, like the pop-up book, seems impervious to getting chucked away) and ‘The Unborn’ (curse born of wartime trauma) thrown in for good measure. You’ll probably identify a couple of dozen other points of genre reference when you watch it.

So why should you watch it? Well, it’s Leonetti’s best film to date, and while I realise that’s not exactly saying much, it does at least point to the possibility of better things from him in a way that everything else on his filmography most definitely doesn’t. And it’s got an attractive young cast who engage with the material and don’t condescend to it, or the audience, in terms of their performances. Also, it doesn’t break its own rules like, say, ‘It Follows’ did. And it doesn’t allow its characters to dodge the inevitable. As much as a lightweight flick like ‘Wish Upon’ can be said to be about anything it’s about the price that has to be paid, never mind how shallow the pleasures that were taken along the way and how ultimately transient they were.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #12: Annabelle

If the success of James Wan’s ‘The Conjuring’ did horror fans a favour by opening the door for ‘The Conjuring 2’, it also did them a disservice by causing John R. Leonetti’s ‘Annabelle’ to exist.

(That’s John R. Leonetti, director of ‘Mortal Kombat: Annihilation’ and ‘The Butterfly Effect 2’, by the way.)

‘Annabelle’ takes an hour and a half plus change to document the provenance of the Annabelle doll and establish it as a vessel for a malevolent spirit – i.e. everything ‘The Conjuring’ did in less than five minutes.

Let’s rattle through a plot synopsis and see how the will to live holds up: newlyweds John (Ward Horton) and Mia (Annabelle Wallis) are expecting their first child; they live next door to a nice old couple who are still coming to terms with the disappearance of their daughter to join a cult … and if anyone currently reading hasn’t already put together the characters’ names, the pregnancy and the cultists and come up with a certain Roman Polanski film, then it’s back to horror movie kindergarten for you.

So anyway, one night the cultists invade the old couple’s home; John, alerted by noise, goes to investigate. Things escalate very quickly, John is overpowered and Mia is stabbed in the belly. Only the swift intervention of some trigger happy cops saves the day. (It’s worth bearing in mind, given how explicitly Polanski’s most famous film has been referenced, the circumstances of his then partner Sharon Tate’s death and the fact that she was pregnant at the time. That the makers of ‘Annabelle’ see fit to exploit this as crassly as they do is nothing short of loathsome.)

Back to the finely nuanced human drama of ‘Annabelle’: Mia and her baby inexplicably survive, but her convalescence is interrupted when weird shit starts happening (the pair of them take an age to twig on that the spectacularly ugly doll John gifted Mia is at the epicentre). Said weird shit culminates in a house fire, after which John moves them to a gaudy apartment building. The Annabelle doll goes with them. Whaddaya know, weird shit keeps happening. Only now Mia’s baby is at risk as well. Slowly, with the help of a book shop owner who specialises in arcane titles … and, seriously, what is it with second hand bookshops in horror movies? How come they’re always stocked with mildewy hardbacks containing nothing but pictures of pentagrams and images of the devil? And how come these text-less tomes always fall open to an image that’s exactly like the weird shit the protagonist’s been experiencing but wouldn’t have got a handle on if it wasn’t for the second hand bookshop owned by the massively over-talented (and usually ethnic) character actor slumming it in a nothing role (here Alfre Woodward)?

‘Annabelle’ is set in the early Seventies (not that the period recreation ever entirely convinces) and is full of genre tropes that would have been old and tired even then. The panoply of references to other movies – ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, ‘The Omen’ and ‘Deep Red’ provide obvious touchstones; there are plenty more – are off-putting enough, but most damnable is the fact that it’s never really scary. The Annabelle doll – creepy in its two or three short scenes in ‘The Conjuring’ – loses its frisson the longer it remains on screen; by the end, it’s merely ugly. Set-pieces that, on paper, should have been tense, are either mishandled or marred by lapses of basic logic or common sense as regards the characters’ decision making processes. The acting, apart from Woodward, is bland. The cinematography is flat and uninteresting.

Remarkably, it made a fuckton of money at the box office – over $250 million from a budget $6.5 million – making ‘Annabelle 2’ an inevitability. David F Sandberg, whose feature-length debut ‘Lights Out’ did a similar cleaning up at the box office number, is attached to direct. Whether a narrative or psychological hook can be found that makes the Annabelle doll scary – pace the lifeless ventriloquist’s dummy in ‘Magic’, still the best scary doll film – remains to be seen, but the director trade-up is to be welcomed.