Released: 4th September
Seen: 6th December
Ed and Lorraine Warren were complete and utter con artists whose damage to the people they claimed to help won’t be fully known for years to come. For literally decades they would go from town to town and “investigate” strange goings-on and somehow come to a “scientific” conclusion that this meant they found some form of demon. All the time just a whole mess of demons, it’s never mental illness or epilepsy or strange coincidences… nope, always demons. I’ve said this before, literally verbatim because I copied that opening section from my review of The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It which I still regard as the worst mainline Conjuring movie (The spinoffs are somehow worse, but none fill me with as much actual rage as The Devil Made Me Do It). One might hope that they would stop this franchise at some point, Horror as a genre is in a new era that’s not exactly suited to what The Warren’s and their lies could inspire but nope, we now have The Conjuring: Last Rites and my god, I hope this is the end because even the lies are getting repetitive and dull.
The Conjuring: Last Rites once again catches up with Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) who are retired due to Ed’s heart condition getting worse. This plan goes well until they hear about the case of the Smurl family who appear to be haunted by a ghost that resides in a mirror and is doing awful things to the family that scares them because they’re scared of loud noises and people with creepy faces. Naturally, Ed and Lorraine try to help, inadvertently getting their daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) and her boyfriend Tony (Ben Hardy) involved. What follows is the standard protocol for a Conjuring film, things float, creatures appear out of nowhere, a lot of bible verses are yelled, either Ed or Lorraine try to stop the other one from continuing out of fear for their health, yada yada yada the movie ends and we can all go back to remembering that Ed and Lorraine were bad people who don’t deserve to be played by actors of this calibre.
Even though I am fully at the point of just hating this franchise for its lack of originality and whitewashing of two con artists, it has to be pointed out that Vera and Patrick are genuinely fantastic in this film as they have been in every other film in this franchise. You believe that they are really trying to help these people, they still give every moment 1000% of their skills and make even the stupidest moments almost work just through sheer force of their talent. They still manage to command every scene and sometimes a scare might actually work in large part due to how good they are in that scene.
Those scares, however, work much less often than one would like and that’s largely because we’ve seen everything this franchise can do. This is kind of the problem with haunting films, there’s only so many times you can slam a door or flicker a light before it feels old hat and this one has that problem. They do try sometimes to make something kinda new happen. Still, it doesn’t work, one of the visuals actually made me laugh because it was trying too hard (A mirror spinning and then stopping on a dime, looking like it’s offended by the people yelling at it isn’t scary, it just isn’t). The few times there was something kind of tense they immediately just kind of moved on, like this film had somewhere to be.
Speaking of time wasting, this is the longest film in the mainline Conjuring franchise and boy does it feel like it. Every scene just felt exhausting and long, very few of them actually building any real tension because for that to happen, you’d have to care about anyone and the problem is there are too many major characters to care about. Notice that I only mentioned The Warrens earlier in the listing of characters? Yeah, that’s because there are 8 members of the Smurl family and absolutely none of them stand out in any interesting way, so why bother? It’s like a bodycount film that doesn’t even have the decency to do mass carnage with the less interesting members of the cast, at least things like the Terrifier movies made up for having some bland, forgettable characters by making their death scenes so over the top that it made up for it. No one dies here, or if they do I literally forgot in the time between this movie ending and me writing this paragraph. Stakes? What are those?!
It’s become pretty obvious that this franchise is coasting for a while now, really after the second Conjuring movie, it’s felt like they’ve just worked out a formula that makes for passable cinema and regurgitate it. Just plug in the bare bones of a story from the Warren’s lives, ignore the parts where people at the time called them out for their bullshit and turn that into 2 hours of monotony. This might claim to be the final film, at least the final one where Patrick and Vera are going to save it enough to make a film that’s watchable at best, but you can tell it’s not. Until this franchise stops making profit, they’re going to keep churning these out without giving a damn about quality or fun.
The Conjuring: Last Rites is just kind of below average, but that lack of quality lays bare the issues that are inherent with making a film about this pair. It’s not scary enough or interesting enough that it’s possible to look past that problem; the entire franchise has done everything that this movie does so many times that it’s not working anymore. Maybe if you’ve never seen a film like this before or you’re the kind of person who can just enjoy haunting/exorcism movies no matter how many times they repeat tropes, it might work for you but for me I just spent the entire film bored and annoyed, a lethal combo even if the movie was about decent human beings.
Movie Meister Reviews 