Annabelle Comes Home is the third Annabelle movie about the cursed/haunted/creepy doll. It’s also the eighth movie in the shared Conjuring cinematic universe and cameos Ed and Lorraine Warren (from the two main Conjuring films) as played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. It’s also the fifth of these movies the creepy doll has either starred or cameod in. So… Annabelle Comes Home is a direct sequel to the intro scene of The Conjuring and takes place before The Conjuring 2. Got all that? Because it kind of doesn’t matter but is still kind of neat that they bother.
So, after all that intro nonsense, is Annabelle Comes Home a good movie? Ehh…. I respect it for having no greater ambition than being the alpha and omega of haunted house movies. If you want to see “A Teenage Girl Walks Down a Dark Hallway and Gets Jump Scared: The Movie”… that’s this movie in a nutshell. Sure, almost all creepy ghost/demon/killer doll/slasher movie is that exact thing… but Annabelle Comes Home forgoes any real pretense at a plot and just gives us scene after scene after scene after scene after scene of (admittedly atmospheric) dark hallways, a camera that can’t quite see what’s in that corner, and SURPRISE GHOST!! I kind of admire the movie for chucking aside the plot… there’s no mystery to solve, nobody to rescue, no cursed amulet to destroy, etc.
But there are the bones of a plot. The Warrens have brought the cursed Annabelle doll home and locked her in their Evil Room of Evil… the most Evil room in the world full of Evil relics from their past as (alleged) demon hunters. Annabelle is the Evilest of Evil relics and is put in a case made of holy glass from a church and is blessed weekly by a priest. So they decide to go on a work trip and leave their young daughter behind with a teen babysitter. It’s perfectly safe because the Evil room of Evil is locked by a key that is not even remotely hard to find. What could go wrong?
Basically, someone lets Annabelle out of her case and all the Evil relics come to life. The plot… find Annabelle and put her back in her case. This is done by wandering around the very large split level home… facing down evil ferrymen, a samurai warrior, a cursed toy, the spirit of a werewolf (didn’t know werewolves made good ghosts, huh?), and some of the demons from the previous movies.
So… is any of this actually good, when you get right down to it? Well… sorta. I mean, it does get a little old seeing yet another dark hallway or encounter with yet another ghost who just seems to want to mess with the main characters rather than kill them. As a jump scare fest, it does a pretty good job of setting things up and has good atmosphere. It’s not particularly successful but I bet if you are the kind of person who hides under the covers over this kind of thing, the whole movie will be a lot of fun. I think people who have seen all this before will not groove on it. Like I said, I respect the (lack of) ambition here… just be a haunted house. Not a haunted house movie, but more like those haunted houses you go to at Halloween. Boo!
Wow…. that’s a lot more than I thought I’d have to say about this movie. Look…. it’s only a decent movie. I mean, it’s a lot better than The Nun or the Curse of La Llarona (two other spinoffs) but it isn’t as good as Annabelle: Creation or the two Conjuring flicks. If you don’t want to see Jump Scare: The Movie, then maybe avoid it… but also respect perhaps that Jump Scare is the alpha and omega of the movie’s ambitions. It’s not pretending to be anything deeper. Good, bad, or indifferent, at least that’s an approach.
Score: 73