‘Insidious: The Red Door’: The ghost of jump scares past

By Jason Z inoman New York Times

“Insidious,” whose fifth installment opened last week, is a second-tier horror franchise — it’s not even the best James Wan franchise starring Patrick Wilson, which would be “The Conjuring” — with a few elite jump scares, including one of the best in the genre.

‘INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR’

Rated: PG-13 for explicit violins and implicit violence break until you have a pilsner or two on Sunday, both the low number of beers and the break between drinking them allows for a deeper engagement and appreciation with each beer. At least that has seemed to be the case with me over the past few months.

Of course, this might not be true for everyone. As I have said many times over the years, everyone’s palate is different and everyone’s palate changes over time. Maybe this phenomenon is just something that is happening during this “beer diet” period for me and won’t happen in the future.

But if any readers engage in any sort of similar beer intake reduction experiments, I’d be interested to hear if you experience anything like I describe here. Hit me up at geolenker@yahoo.com.

Beer note

I had to laugh when my pal Ray sent me the recent story about FOX host Larry Kudlow claiming that President Biden’s climate policies would soon force Americans to drink “plant-based” beer.

I know a few beers incorporate animal products into the recipe (like oyster stout), but aside from those rare specialty types of brews, I’m not sure what kind of beer Mr. Kudlow has been drinking.

Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes

Playing at: Regal MGM Springfield; Cinemark Enfield, Hampshire Mall, West Springfield

In the original in 2010, Lorraine Lambert (Barbara Hershey) is telling her son, Josh (Wilson), about a horrible dream when a red-faced demon suddenly appears behind his head. It’s a magnificent shock because of the askew blocking, the patient misdirection of the editing and Hershey’s committed performance.

In “Insidious: The Red Door,” a grim, workmanlike effort that collapses into woo-woo nonsense, Wilson makes his directorial debut, and demonstrates he grasps the importance of that jump scare, which is sketched in charcoal on paper next to his name in the opening credits. But that reference is also a reminder of what’s missing.

The movie begins nine years after the second “Insidious” at the funeral of Lorraine, and its first scare, a nicely oblique if relatively simple one, once again takes place above her son’s head. Josh’s memory has been scrubbed in the previous film but nags at him, and Wilson doesn’t move the camera from his own face inside a car as he goes through an array of emotions while texting his son Dalton (Ty Simpkins). This prickly relationship is at the center of the movie, as dad drives his son to college. They share the family curse, a habit of being visited by evil figures from another realm called the Further. (Think the Upside Down

from “Stranger Things.”)

As has become cliché, trauma takes center stage, with characters mouthing lines like, “We need to remember even the things that hurt” — which is at least better than pretentious small talk like “Death floods the mind with memory.”

The leaden screenplay would be easier to overlook

SEE MOVIE, PAGE E8