Ed's Review Dot Com

Universal Pictures, Dark Universe, Dentsu,

Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis, Russell Crowe, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance, Marwan Kenzari, Stephen Thompson

Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) is a treasure hunter who stumbles upon an ancient tomb. He accidentally releases the spirit of Ahmanet, an ancient demon, and brings her back to conquer the earth. Though Nick is frightened for his life, he is the chosen one who is to sacrifice himself to make her rule the Earth again.

This was a bit of a dud for me. The Mummy movies with Brandan Fraser were surprisingly rather decent. There was lots of suspense, lots of action, and it was a roller coaster ride. I place the blame for this one directly on Mr. Cruise though. I guess he was trying to play some kind of character under the power of this evil woman, but the delivery was just awful. The beginning of the film where he’s trying to be a grave robber type guy who is looking for treasure buried under the sand, the dialog was simply awful. It seemed like a high school drama production or something. I mean it was really badly delivered. The rest of the movie, he just couldn’t pull off the character in the least. The action scenes weren’t too bad, but they were kind of choppy as well, and started and stopped pretty much at will. The whole thing was kind of hard to follow even though it seemed really simple. Annabelle Wallis and Russell Crowe weren’t bad. They were the only normal characters in the movie, since Tom Cruise was all over the place. One shining star in the movie which garners the most credit is Sofia Boutella who plays Ahmanet. She definitely put in an interesting performance, and she was able to best deal with Tom as he ran around from place to place. I found the whole experience to be underwhelming, and this is another of those movies that didn’t need a remake. I would suggest that you skip this one.

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New Line Cinema, Evergreen Media Group,

Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Alfre Woodard, Eric Ladin, Tony Amendola

In 2013’s The Conjuring we met Ed and Lorraine Warren who study the paranormal and assist in supernatural situations. In their home vault they had a series of objects that had a strong connection to evil and demons and the like. The pride of their collection was a very creepy doll named Annabelle. Well, we know we’re not done with Annabelle just yet, but this film is actually a prequel to The Conjuring where we learn the back story about where Annabelle came from and what horrible things she has done in the past. Basically, a gift to a young expectant woman by her husband. She’s a doll collector and Annabelle completes the set. But when the deranged daughter of their next door neighbor arrives back home with her fellow cult member boyfriend to kill everyone in sight and takes a liking to the doll, from that point on Annabelle has a life of her own. The evil follows them, and Annabelle is a doll that can’t seem to be destroyed.

This is a rather simple horror film, but well made, quite interesting, and with lots of horror and suspense. Though the doll with a spirit has been done by Chucky for years, and the parents trying to save their unborn child has been around before, it’s quite a good little story, and Annabelle, the doll, will surely give you the creeps. I don’t know what it is about possessed children’s toys, but this doll is really dreadful. I don’t think this is going to be a huge box office hit, but the timing is perfect, and I do believe it will do better than most people expect. I think it’s a fun little movie, and will give you some serious jolts both through the creepiness of it, and as well as through the sound effects. They are suspenseful scares mixed with the usual startling sound effect scares. This is set back in what looks like back in the 60’s and the music and technology is really spot on. It was a trip back in time as well. But the story is pretty tight, well written, and for the month of October, I would think it’s a nice evening to go out for an evening of frights in the theater for a change of pace. We went to an early showing on Saturday, and the theater was probably at least 75% full. There were lots of shrieks and screams from the crowd, and I think most everyone had a great time. If you are a horror fan, this is a pretty good one, and I enjoyed it a lot. This one I’m glad I went out to see on the big screen!

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