Unlike the first Conjuring spinoff, Annabelle, which was one of the worst movies of 2014, David F. Sandberg’s Annabelle: Creation is actually very much enjoyable.
David F. Sandberg is an interesting director. Lights Out, his first feature film, may not be one of the best horror movies out there, but it’s certainly very unique. The last act of Lights Out plays like an action movie, with characters using various objects that emit light — ceiling lights, flash lights, smartphone torch lights — as “guns,” to destroy the evil entity. In Annabelle: Creation, Sandberg does it once again. This is a movie that starts off like any other conventional horror movie, only to turn into a ridiculous action-comedy. It doesn’t get under your skin the way James Wan’s Conjuring does, but rather makes you feel the way you do in a theme park haunted house ride.
However, there is a sequence in the movie that will make you go, “WHAT EVEN?!”
Fair warning…. Spoilers ahead!
In the second act of the movie, one of the major characters in the film, Mr. Mullins, dies. Heck, he doesn’t just die, he dies in a very, very, gruesome manner. At this point in the film, most of the characters don’t even believe that there’s an evil entity in the house. The mysterious death of Mr. Mullins felt like it should have been the turning point in the movie. Imagine coming home to see a man gruesomely killed. How would you react? However, in a rather jarring turn of events, the characters reacted rather nonchalantly, with Sister Charlotte telling the kids, “Girls, time for bed.”
In a fairly well-balanced movie, this sequence took me out of the movie completely. So much so that I actually buzzed David F. Sandberg on Twitter to ask him if a major scene was deleted for time.
Check it out:
People die all the time, you still need to sleep 🙂
— David F. Sandberg (@ponysmasher) August 13, 2017
While he didn’t actually talk about a possible deleted scene, his cheeky response cracked me up. Thanks for the laughs, Pony Smasher!