Annabelle review.
The first spin-off from The Conjuring hit theaters ten years ago today. It showed there was plenty of box office potential in The Conjuring Universe…even when it’s shoveling out forgettable entries.
Classic movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Annabelle
Directed by John R. Leonetti
Written by Gary Dauberman
Starring Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Tony Amendola, Alfre Woodard, Kerry O’Malley, Brian Howe and Eric Laden
Annabelle Review
The Conjuring was a hot property when it was released in 2013. It brought in 300 million dollars more than its budget at the worldwide box office. No one knew how hot it was until over a year later with the release of prequel/spin-off Annabelle. Produced on a franchise low budget and focused entirely on the cursed doll scene in the opening of The Conjuring…Annabelle raked in 250 million dollars over its budget. Warner Bros. had a certified franchise on its hands. One that could sustain multiple offshoots from the mainline characters. Unfortunately, Annabelle also proved that it didn’t matter if the movies were any good.
Now…let’s qualify that last part a bit. The Conjuring Universe has plenty of strong installments. The Annabelle series itself has seen two superior sequels released. The next spin-off, The Nun, was even worse…made even more…and spawned a superior sequel itself. It’s not as if they were setting out to shovel crap into theater with “The Conjuring Universe” stamp on it. It just didn’t matter much if a massive creative misfire found its way into the mix. The franchise probably operates at around 50/50 between good and bad entries…maybe slightly above. It’s been a consistent global box office success either way.
Make no mistake, Annabelle is not a good movie. It feels every bit like the footnote to the opening of The Conjuring that it is designed to be. A “further reading available” for a far superior text. It’s the behind-the-scenes concept of building this Universe that remains its most interesting aspect. Low to medium budget horror released to a giant built in audience. Huge financial successes. If you look at the model cynically…it’s surprising as many installments turn out as good as they do. Annabelle certainly didn’t offer much hope when it hit theaters a decade ago.
Frankly, the movie feels like a first draft. They hadn’t figured out how to build an even slightly compelling story around an inanimate object. The doll doesn’t have the luxury of running around killing folks like Chucky or Megan. She can just sit there…staring at you. Their answer was to provide a backstory as to why the doll was evil. Usually a bad idea, right? Things tend to get less scary the more we understand them. No one watches the Halloween franchise and thinks “it really gets going when they tell us why Michael Myers is the way he is”. No one watches Jaws and thinks “if only we could have seen more of the shark”.
Ten years later…both arguments have proven to be untrue. The next two Annabelle movies succeeded with the same caveats. 2017’s Annabelle: Creation takes the story further back to give a more elaborate origin story. 2019’s Annabelle Comes Home builds an exciting haunted house around the doll’s inactivity. What could have been excused before now looks different with hindsight. The original is just a bad movie. Given that two more passes at the property found ways to do it all better…it’s clearly a movie that would have benefited from more time and thought.
The story centers around a couple expecting their first baby. The husband, John (Ward Horton) buys our familiar silent antagonist for his wife’s, Mia (Annabelle Wallis) doll collection. The couple is attacked after their next-door neighbors are murdered…and life after that becomes a nightmare strangely connected to the doll.
A story like that requires the weird stuff that happens to the couple to be really good. We already know that we’re going to spend a lot of Annabelle investigating the doll and the supernatural. The movie fails to bring excitement to the table outside of a few moments. The opening attack is strong. There’s a great moment where Mia sees a little girl running at her that works better than anything else in the movie. Mostly, however, Annabelle goes to a worn-out bag of tricks. How is that doll here? I swear I threw it away! Yawn.
It’s likely the creative team realized there was a lack of frights in the program. It follows the same path that The Nun would four years later. If a scene isn’t scary…mess with the sound design. Annabelle isn’t as much of an audio disaster as The Nun is…few, if any, movies ever have been. But it suffers from the same misguided thought. When people aren’t jumping…turn the volume way up and try to force it. Scenes alternate between too quiet and too loud…creating an annoying viewing experience that replaces jumps with eyerolls. Scary movies don’t have to resort to this trick. Annabelle has no choice.
There are other problems, of course. The Shudder documentary Horror Noire discusses the usage of the story’s lone minority character better than I can here. Alfre Woodard, a fine actor giving her usual strong performance, is saddled with both the “magical” and “sacrificial” role that horror has too often ascribed to African American actors. Obviously, this could just be a case of casting the best person you could get for a pre-written role. The bigger issue is how little of Woodard the movie gives us. She appears when Mia is starting her investigation…provides her tragic backstory…and then pops up to save the family in the end. Woodard is the best actor Annabelle has at its disposal. Reducing her to a convenient exposition giver and even more convenient conclusion for the main characters is a rough choice.
Tony Amendola does what he can with an equally truncated role as Father Perez. He’s there to deliver even more exposition and further connect the story to The Conjuring. His character would reappear in 2019’s The Curse of La Llorona. Tough call getting two of the bottom three parts of The Conjuring Universe.
As for our two leads…they’re fine. They have the unenviable task of trying to carry underwritten parts. They don’t have the luxury of putting spins on monologues of some interest like Woodard and Amendola. Mostly…they have to walk around being confused and/or scared. Annabelle Wallis would have the opportunity to steal the screen in 2021’s Malignant. That was the product of director James Wan. Wan served as a producer on Annabelle. At least something good came out of enduring a movie that underserves her character at every turn. Well…that and headlining a giant box office success. Which, if we’ve learned anything from Annabelle after ten years…is what mattered most.
Scare Value
Annabelle isn’t a good movie. It made so much money that we eventually got two more installments. Those two movies turned out much better than the original. Its legacy is firmly rooted in providing a proof of concept. The Conjuring Universe was hot enough to sustain multiple offshoots. People can’t get enough of the franchise. Even when the installments are as boring and vanilla as Annabelle.
2/5
Annabelle Links
Streaming on Netflix
Rent/Buy on VOD from Fandango at Home and Amazon
Buy on Blu-Ray from Amazon
