Insidious

From the co-creators of ‘Saw’ (James Wan and Leigh Whannell, here director and writer) and the director of ‘Paranormal Activity’ (Oren Peli, producing) comes a project featuring nothing that was original, distinctive or scary about either earlier film. It starts like a haunted-house movie: spooked by something nasty in the loft of his parents’ new house, Dalton (Ty Simpkins) lapses into a coma. His mother, Renai (Rose Byrne), hires loopy medium Elise (Lin Shaye), who declares: ‘Your son is not in a coma. It’s not the house that’s haunted, it’s him.’ Renai’s sceptical husband (Patrick Wilson) is equally unimpressed when Elise calls in a pair of bickering, nerdy ghostbusters (Angus Sampson and Whannell), who arrive with tons of Heath Robinson gear. Suddenly, we swerve into a preposterous supernatural mystery – seemingly grabbed from the waste baskets of M Night Shyamalan and Sam Raimi – as Dalton is besieged by evil spirits and the medium spouts half-baked guff about astral planes. Not so much insidious as inexcusable.