Review: ‘Insidious: The Red Door,’ starring Ty Simpkins, Patrick Wilson, Sinclair Daniel, Hiam Abbass, Andrew Astor and Rose Byrne

July 6, 2023

by Carla Hay

Ty Simpkins in “Insidious: The Red Door” (Photo courtesy of Screen Gems)

“Insidious: The Red Door”

Directed by Patrick Wilson

Culture Representation: Taking place on the East Coast of the United States, the horror film “Insidious: The Red Door” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few Latinos and African Americans) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: Divorced father Josh Lambert and his estranged teenage son Dalton continue to find terror in their astral projection abilities where they can see and communicate with spirits from a ghostly realm. 

Culture Audience: Besides appealing to the obvious target audience of the “Insidious” movie franchise, “Insidious: The Red Door” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of star/director Patrick Wilson and horror movies that dumb everything down.

Patrick Wilson in “Insidious: The Red Door” (Photo by Boris Martin/Screen Gems)

“Insidious: The Red Door” is a poorly constructed and dull horror movie with subplots that go nowhere. The movie’s ending is a mishmash of lazy and ineffective jump scares. It’s disappointing, because the story had potential but is badly mishandled. “Insidious: The Red Door” is an example of a sequel that’s leeching off of the name recognition of the original movie but doesn’t deliver anything close to the quality of the original film.

Directed by Patrick Wilson and written by Scott Teems, “Insidious: The Red Door” is the fifth movie in the “Insidious” series. “Insidious: The Red Door” is also Wilson’s feature-film directorial debut. Wilson co-stars in “Insidious: The Red Door,” as well as the first “Insidious” movie (released in 2010) and 2013’s “Insidious: Chapter 2.” The other previous movies in the series are the prequel “Insidious: Chapter 3” (released in 2015) and 2018’s “Insidious: The Last Key.” Most of the stars from these first two “Insidious” movies are in “Insidious: The Red Door.” Unfortunately, they returned for an embarrassing sequel.

“Insidious: The Red Door” takes place in an unnamed U.S. state on the East Coast and was filmed in New York state and New Jersey. The movie begins shortly after the end of “Insidious: Chapter 2,” when the middle-class Lambert family has gone through another ordeal with evil spirits inhabiting a realm called The Further. Family patriarch Josh Lambert (played by Wilson) and his oldest child Dalton (played by Ty Simpkins) have the abilities to astral project and go into The Further, where they become invisible in the real world but visible to the spirits and other entities that exist in The Further.

Spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen “Insidious: Chapter 2”: Dalton and Josh were both trapped in The Further and managed to escape by the end of the movie. The plots of the first two “Insidious” movies are mentioned in conversations and in flashbacks in “Insidious: The Red Door.” Anyone who sees “Insidious: The Red Door” but not the first two “Insidious” movies will be getting a lot of spoiler information about the first two “Insidious” movies in “Insidious: The Red Door,” whether people like it or not.

The opening scene of “Insidious: The Red Door” shows Josh and 10-year-old Dalton undergoing hypnosis so they won’t remember what happened to them in The Further. Other members of the family are in the same room, including Josh’s wife Renai Lambert (played by Rose Byrne) and Josh’s mother Lorraine (played by Barbara Hershey), who look like they were the ones who wanted this hypnosis to happen. Dalton’s two younger siblings are brother Foster and sister Kali. During this hypnosis, which is performed by an unseen female priest (voiced by Dagmara Dominczyk), Dalton is told that he will only remember that he was in a coma.

The movie then fast-forwards nine years later. Josh and Renai are now divorced. Josh, Renai, Dalton, Foster (played by Andrew Astor) and Kali (played by Juliana Davies) are at a graveside funeral cerrmony for Lorraine, who passed away after an illness. Dalton is now a mopey 19-year-old who’s about to go away to an art college somewhere on the East Coast. The college is not close to where his parents live but it’s far enough away that it requires a road trip. Dalton is a talented illustrator, so you know what that means: Dalton will be sketching a lot of creepy drawings in this movie.

Foster is about 15 or 16 years old. Kali is about 10 or 11 years old. At the graveside, Kali mournfully says that she misses her grandmother. Dalton cynically replies that dead people don’t miss living people. Renai comforts Kali by saying that it’s not true and that Lorraine misses Kali too. Dalton is firm in his belief that there’s no such thing as the afterlife. He will soon change his mind.

Dalton and Josh have a tension-filled relationship where they are barely on speaking terms. Renai suggests that it might be a good idea for Josh to be the one to drive Dalton off to college and perhaps mend their father/son rift during this road trip. After the graveside ceremony, Josh is sitting alone in his parked car when he decides to text Dalton with this road trip proposal. Josh doesn’t notice (but viewers can see) that the ghost of a man is right behind the car. It’s later revealed who this man is. It’s enough to say that he has the names Smash Face and Ben Burton (played by David Call) in the movie.

Dalton reluctantly agrees to let Josh drive him off to college, where Dalton will be living on campus. During the trip, they argue. Josh, whose father abandoned the family when he was a boy, thinks that Dalton is ungrateful and should feel lucky that Josh wants to be a part of Dalton’s life. Dalton thinks that Josh was too much of an absentee father after the divorce.

When they arrive at the campus and start moving Dalton’s possessions in his dorm room, they argue some more. Josh feels hurt and rejected when he sees that Dalton is putting up illustrations on the wall of all of Dalton’s relatives except for Josh. In the middle of this family tension, Dalton’s roommate suddenly arrives. She’s a young woman named Chris Winslow (played by Sinclair Daniel), who is talkative, sarcastic and a little offbeat.

There’s a not-very-believable explanation that Chris was assigned to this room because she has a unisex name, and the college’s housing staff assumed that she was male. (Most colleges have a policy for first-year students to have on-campus roommates who are of the same gender. ) Dalton and Josh say that they didn’t expect to her to be female, so Chris graciously says that she’ll make other living arrangements with the campus’ housing staff.

After the argument that Dalton and Josh have on the day that Dalton moves into his dorm room, Dalton dismisses Josh with a brusque comment when Josh is about to leave: “No wonder Mom divorced you. Thanks for the ride.” “Insidious: The Red Door” eventually shows why Josh and Renai got divorced, in a scene that’s a ripoff from a well-known horror movie from the 1980s. (Hint: It’s a movie based on a Stephen King novel.)

Josh has no memory of the horror experiences that he’s had, but he senses that there are parts of his life that are unexplained, dark secrets. He mentions early in the movie that he feels like his brain has become foggy and that he’s losing his memory skills. Later in the movie, there’s a fairly insipid scene of Josh testing his memory skills by taping family photos backwards on a window in his house and trying to remember who is in each photo.

A red door is a portal to The Further, but don’t expect much to be happening with the “red door” part of “Insidious: The Red Door” until the last third of the film. The first two-thirds of the movie are a boring slog of Dalton and Chris adjusting to college life and to each other as roommates. Dalton starts to have hallucinations, while Chris tries to get Dalton to open up about himself. Dalton, just like Josh, feels there are secretive things in his life that are buried in his psyche, but he doesn’t quite know what they are.

Expect to see repetitive scenes of people seeing ghosts and then “waking up” as if they just had a nightmare. It happens to Josh. It happens to Dalton. And it eventually happens to Chris. There’s a time-wasting scene where Josh has a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, and visions from his past come back to haunt him. Dr. Phillip Brower (played by E. Roger Mitchell), who gives Josh the MRI scan, tells that Josh was asleep the entire time that Josh insists that he was being attacked by menacing people.

Dalton is anti-social and doesn’t want to go a frat house party thrown by a fraternity that Josh was a member of when Josh was in college. Chris doesn’t really care about the frat party either, but she convinces Josh that they should go to this party together, if only to make fun of the ridiculousness that will happen at the party. It’s at this party that Josh begins to find out that he can see dead people.

There’s an insecure dork with the name Nick the Dick (played by Peter Dager), who’s some kind of leader of the fraternity. At the party, Dalton witnesses a student (played by Stephen Gray) vomiting in Nick’s bathroom toilet. There’s a backstory about this student that’s one of the unfinished subplots. The main purpose of introducing this mystery character seems to be to have a gross-out scene later involving much more vomit. Nick gets into a conflict with Chris, who kicks Nick in the groin after Nick calls her a “clown.”

“Insidious: The Red Door” also wastes time showing Dalton in class sessions taught by his pretentious and frequently cruel art teacher Professor Armagan (played by Hiam Abbass), who seems to enjoy humiliating students and expelling them from her class whenever she feels like it. However, Dalton is spared from the wrath of Professor Armagan because she like his drawings. Not surprisingly, Dalton’s drawings become increasingly macabre when Professor Armagan orders her students to dig deep into their souls and draw what they feel.

Dalton ends up drawing a red door with a demon outside. He accidentally cuts himself after making this illustration, and the blood becomes a long stain on the drawing. You can easily predict what will happen next. (Hint: It involves The Further and a lot of “daddy issues.”) But all of it is just so jumbled and ridiculous, with one flimsy horror scene after another. The average “Insidious” fan could’ve written a better screenplay than this mess.

“Insidious: The Red Door” also throws in cameos of familiar characters from “Insidious” Chapter 2,” as if these cameos will somehow make “Insidious: The Red Door” any better. They don’t. Lin Shaye, who has the role of psychic/medium Elise Rainier, shows up in archival video footage and in someone’s visions. Her screen time in “Insidious: The Red Door” is less than five minutes. Her appearance in “Insidious: The Red Door” is expected, but ultimately it’s very underwhelming.

Leigh Whannell, who wrote the first four “Insidious” movies, returns with Angus Sampson as their respective characters of Specs and Tucker, two paranormal investigators, who are only seen on a TV screen in “Insidious: The Red Door.” Steve Coulter reprises his role as Carl (a former colleague of Elise’s), in a cameo where Carl shows up at Lorraine’s funeral and has a brief conversation with Josh, who doesn’t remember Carl. All these cameos do is remind “Insidious” fans that the first two “Insidious” movies are still the best of the series.

The acting performances in “Insidious” The Red Door” are adequate. Simpkins has the most difficult role to play, since his Dalton character goes through the most emotional and physical ups and downs. Wilson has some depth as Josh, but this character has become an annoying whiner going through a midlife crisis. Daniel’s Chris character, who acts like she dropped in from a young-adult sitcom, is an awkward sidekick to Dalton. “Insidious: The Red Door” keeps bungling what could have been an intriguing story. It will make “Insidious” fans think that the door should remain shut on these characters who were brought back for a painfully awful movie.

Screen Gems will release “Insidious: The Red Door” in U.S. cinemas on July 7, 2023.

Review: ‘The Black Phone,’ starring Ethan Hawke

June 16, 2022

by Carla Hay

Ethan Hawke and Mason Thames in “The Black Phone” (Photo by Fred Norris/Universal Pictures)

“The Black Phone”

Directed by Scott Derrickson

Culture Representation: Taking place mostly in Denver in 1978, the horror film “The Black Phone” features a cast of predominantly white characters (with a few African Americans, Latinos and Asians) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: A 13-year-boy, who gets kidnapped by a serial killer, is kept in the killer’s basement, where the boy gets phone calls from the ghosts of the other teenage boys who were murdered by the killer. 

Culture Audience: “The Black Phone” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of star Ethan Hawke and anyone looking for a tension-filled horror movie that isn’t a remake or a sequel.

Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw in “The Black Phone” (Photo by Fred Norris/Universal Pictures)

Creepy and suspenseful, the horror movie “The Black Phone” has the ghosts of murdered children as story catalysts, but the movie’s equally harrowing moments are in depicting realistic child abuse that can come from a stranger, a family member or a schoolmate. “The Black Phone” does everything a horror flick is supposed to do: keep audiences on edge, have well-acted memorable characters, and deliver plenty of moments that are genuinely terrifying.

Directed by Scott Derrickson, “The Black Phone” reunites Derrickson with several key players involved in the making of Derrickson’s 2012 sleeper hit horror film “Sinister,” including co-screenwriter C. Robert Cargill, producer Jason Blum and actors Ethan Hawke and James Ransone. Just like in “Sinister,” Hawke has the starring role, while Ransone has a pivotal supporting role in “The Black Phone.” Both movies are from Blumhouse Productions, the company owned by Blum, whose specialty is mainly horror. Both movies are effective horror films, but “Sinister” was a haunted house story based entirely on supernatural occurrences, while “The Black Phone” taps into the real-life horror of child kidnapping and murders with some supernatural elements as part of the story.

“Sinister” had an original screenplay by Derrickson and Cargill. The screenwriting duo adapted “The Black Phone” from a short story of the same title in author Joe Hill’s 2005 collection “20th Century Ghosts.” (Hill is the son of horror master Stephen King.) In the production notes for “The Black Phone,” Derrickson says many aspects of the movie (including the scenes of the movie’s protagonist being bullied at school) were directly inspired by his childhood growing up in Denver in the 1970s. “The Black Phone” takes place in Denver in 1978.

The movie opens with a seemingly idyllic scene of teenage boys playing a casual game of baseball. Two of the players in the game are 13-year-old Finney Blake (played by Mason Thames) and Bruce Yamada (played by Tristan Pravong), who are both classmates in the same school. (Some movie descriptions list Finney’s last name as Shaw, but his surname in the movie is definitely Blake.) After the game, Bruce is kidnapped by someone driving a mysterious black van.

Bruce’s abduction is the latest in a series of incidents in the northern Denver area, where other teenage boys have gone missing and are widely believed to be kidnapped. Bruce is the fourth boy to have disappeared. The other three missing kids are Griffin Stagg (played by Banks Repeta, also known as Michael Banks Repeta), the neighborhood paper boy Billy Showalter (played by Jacob Moran) and an angry troublemaker named Vance Hopper (played by Brady Hepner). The police who are investigating have very little information to go on, since most of the disappearances had no known witnesses. All of the boys are believed to be have been kidnapped while they were outside on the streets.

While people in the area are feeling that children are unsafe on the streets, Finney (who sometimes goes by the name Finn) and his 11-year-old sister Gwendolyn “Gwen” Blake (played by Madeleine McGraw) fear for their safety inside their own home. That’s because their widower father Terrence Blake (played by Jeremy Davies) is a violent alcoholic. Terrence is especially brutal to Gwen, because she has psychic abilities that he wants her to deny. Gwen’s psychic visions usually come to her in dreams.

Based on conversations in the movie, viewers find out that Gwen inherited these psychic abilities from her mother, who committed suicide. Terrence blames the suicide on these psychic abilities because the kids’ mother (who doesn’t have a name in the movie) claimed that she heard voices. Terrence says that these voices eventually told her to kill herself. The movie doesn’t go into details about when Terrence became an alcoholic, but it’s implied he’s been on a downward spiral since his wife’s suicide.

After Bruce disappears, somehow the police find out that Gwen told people about a dream she had that Bruce was abducted by a man driving a black van and carrying black balloons. Because two black balloons were found at the place where Bruce was last seen alive (the police did not make the black balloon information available to the public), investigators from the Denver Police Department—Detective Wright (played by E. Roger Mitchell) and Detective Miller (played by Troy Rudeseal)—interview Gwen at school and at her home. She is defiant and defensive over the cops’ suspicions that she knows more than she telling.

Gwen starts cursing at the cops and swears she has nothing to do with the disappearances of Brandon and the other missing boys. When Gwen is asked to explain how she knew about the black balloons, all Gwen will say is, “Sometimes my dreams are right.” Terrence is present during this interview. He’s nervous and apprehensive that the cops are in his home. He’s also angry that Gwen is being disrespectful to the cops.

After the police detectives leave, it leads to a heart-wrenching scene where a drunk Terrence viciously beats Gwen with a belt and demands that she repeat, “My dreams are just dreams.” Sensitive viewers, be warned: This is a hard scene to watch, and it might be triggering for people who’ve experienced this type of violence. During this beating, Finney just stands by helplessly and watches, but later in the movie, he expresses guilt and remorse about not stopping his father from assaulting Gwen. As abused children, Finney and Gwen often rely on each other for emotional support.

Finney is introverted and doesn’t have any close friends at school. However, things start looking up for him a little bit in his biology class when the students have to do dissections of frogs and are required to have a lab partner. No one wants to be Finney’s lab partner except a girl named Donna (played by Rebecca Clarke), who is a fairly new student. Donna indicates that she likes Finney and probably has been noticing him for a while. His bashful reaction shows that the attraction is mutual.

Finney experiences physical violence at school, where he is targeted by three bullies. One day, in the men’s restroom at school, these three bullies corner Finney and are about to assault him. However, a tough teenager named Robin Arreland (played by Miguel Cazarez Mora), who’s also a student at the school, intervenes and scares off the bullies because Robin is known to be a brutal fighter. Robin advises Finney to be better at standing up for himself.

Eventually, Robin and Finney get to know each other too. They don’t become best friends, but they become friendly acquaintances. This budding friendship is interrupted when Robin disappears, not long after Bruce has gone missing. The cops visit the Blake home again, but Gwen has nothing further to add, mainly because she terrified about divulging to the cops what she has dreamed.

It isn’t long before Finney is kidnapped too. This isn’t spoiler information, since it’s shown in the trailers for “The Black Phone.” His kidnapper is nicknamed The Grabber (played by Hawke), and he approaches Finney on a late afternoon when Finney is walking down a residential street by himself. The Grabber (who has long hair and is wearing white clown makeup, sunglasses and a top hat) is driving a black van with the logo of a company named Abracadabra Entertainment and Supplies.

When The Grabber sees Finney, he pretends to stumble out of the van and spill a bag of groceries. Finney offers to help him pick up the groceries. The Grabber tells the teen that he’s a part-time magician and asks Finney if he wants to see a magic trick.

Finney agrees somewhat apprehensively, and his nervousness grows when he notices that there are black balloons in the van. When Finney asks this stranger if he has black balloons in the van, the stranger kidnaps him. Finney has now become the sixth teenage boy to disappear in the same neighborhood.

Finney is kept in a dark and dingy house basement that has a mattress and a toilet. On the wall is a black phone that The Grabber says is disconnected. “It hasn’t worked since I was a kid,” The Grabber tells a terrified Finney.

The Grabber (who usually wears grinning clown masks that look similar to DC Comics’ The Joker character) tells Finney not to bother yelling for help, because the entire basement is soundproof. There’s only one door to and from the basement. It goes without saying that the door is locked from the outside. The Grabber also has a black pit bull as a guard dog.

“The Black Phone” has several scenes that show how The Grabber is a completely twisted creep. There’s a scene where Finney wakes up to find the masked Grabber staring at Finney because The Grabber says he just wanted to spend time looking at Finney. When Finney says he’s hungry and asks for food, The Grabber won’t feed him right away. There are other scenes where The Grabber uses intimidation and mind games to keep Finney under his control.

Even though The Grabber says that the black phone in the basement doesn’t work, shortly after Finney becomes imprisoned in the basement, the phone rings. The first time that Finney picks up the phone, he doesn’t hear anything. The next time the phone rings, he hears static and a voice of a boy who sounds far away. It’s the first indication that Finney has psychic abilities too.

It was already revealed in the trailers for “The Black Phone” that much of the movie is about Finney getting calls from the ghosts of the boys who were murdered by The Grabber. The only real spoiler information for “The Black Phone” would be the answers to these questions: “Does Finney escape? If so, how?” “Does Gwen use her psychic abilities to help find Finney?” “What will ultimately happen to The Grabber?”

Another character who is part of the story is a man in his early 40s named Max (played by Ransone), who gets on the radar of police because Max has become obsessed with the cases of the missing boys. Max is a cocaine-snorting loner who thinks of himself as an amateur detective. His home is filled with newspaper clippings and other items related to the investigations about the missing boys.

Even though a lot of information about the “The Black Phone” plot is already revealed in the movie’s trailers, there’s still much about the movie that’s worth seeing. (Audiences also got a early showings of “The Black Phone” when it screened at film festivals, including the 2021 edition of Fantastic Fest, where “The Black Phone” had its world premiere.) The scenes where Finney communicates with the dead boys are absolutely haunting and often mournful. These scenes include some flashbacks to the boys’ lives before they were kidnapped.

Vance’s flashback scene is artfully filmed as a 1970s hazy memory, as are many of the flashback scenes. Sweet’s 1974 hit “Fox on the Run” is used to great effect in this scene, which takes place in a Shop-N-Go convenience store where Vance is playing pinball. Gwen’s dream sequences were filmed using Super 8 film, which was the standard film type for home movies in the 1970s.

The production design, costume design, hairstyling, makeup and cinematography in “The Black Phone” all give the movie an authentic-looking recreation of the 1970s. The movie’s soundtrack includes some well-chosen songs, including the Edgar Winter Group’s 1972 hit “Free Ride,” which is played in the movie’s happy-go-lucky baseball game scene that opens the movie. (Coincidentally, “Free Ride” and “Fox on the Run” were also prominently featured in writer/director Richard Linklater’s 1993 classic comedy “Dazed and Confused,” which is an ode to 1970s teens.)

“The Black Phone” also has pop culture mentions to movies of the era. Finney and Robin talk about the 1974 horror movie “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” which Finney says his strict father would never allow him to see because he’s underage. Robin says he has an uncle who takes Robin to movie theaters to watch rated R movies. They also enthusiastically discuss the 1973 Bruce Lee action film “Enter the Dragon,” which is “The Black Phone” filmmakers’ nod to how popular Lee was with teenage boys in that era. Later, Finney is seen watching the 1959 horror movie “The Tingler” on TV one night, which is a scene inspired by director Derrickson doing the same thing when he was a child.

“The Black Phone” also accurately depicts the limited resources that people had if children went missing in 1978, long before the Internet and smartphones existed. It was also before missing kids’ photos were put on milk cartons, inspired by the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz, who was kidnapped while walking by himself to school in New York City. It was also before the 1981 abduction and murder of 6-year-old Adam Walsh, who was taken from a shopping mall in Hollywood, Florida. As a result of this tragedy, Adam’s father John Walsh later founded the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The 1970s decade was also a prolific time for notorious serial killers, including Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, the Hillside Stranglers and the Son of Sam. According to the production notes for “The Black Phone,” The Grabber character was at least partially based on Gacy, who did part-time work as a party clown. Most of Gacy’s victims were teenage boys and young men whom he lured into his home by hiring them to do temporary housecare jobs. Gacy’s crimes had a sexual component that’s not included in “The Black Phone,” although there are hints that The Grabber could also be a child molester when it’s mentioned that The Grabber likes to play a game called Naughty Boy.

In his portrayal of The Grabber, Hawke gives a viscerally disturbing performance that will linger with viewers long after the movie ends. Thames makes an impressive feature-film debut as Finney, who goes through a wide range of emotions in the movie. McGraw is also a standout in her portrayal of feisty and sometimes foul-mouthed Gwen. “The Black Phone” has some comic relief in how Gwen is ambivalent about the Christianity that she has been taught. And although Robin’s screen time is brief, Mora is quite good in this portrayal of a character who makes an impact on Finney’s life.

Despite some predictable plot developments, “The Black Phone” is a better-than-average horror movie because it doesn’t forget that the story and characters should be more important than showing a lot of violence and gore. The movie does have violence and gore, but it’s not gratuitous. “The Black Phone” also makes a point of showing that abuse crimes don’t always come from strangers, but that abuse is often hiding in plain sight in schools and in families, where the abuse is committed by people who seem to be “upstanding citizens.” It’s this message that should resonate as a warning that a lot of horror in this movie continues to happen in real life.

Universal Pictures will release “The Black Phone” in U.S. cinemas on June 24, 2022.

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