In James Wan’s The Conjuring, the lead characters made reference to an occult museum in which various cursed or demonic items were kept, one of which was a dusty and broken vintage doll. This doll is that subject of Annabelle, a prequel/spin-off which details how the doll came to be in its current place of rest. Doting husband John (Ward Horton) surprises his pregnant wife Mia (Annabelle Wallis) with the gift of the doll in question. After their home is invaded and their neighbours are murdered by satanic cultists, the couple begin to experience a string of supernatural occurrences revolving around the doll.

While directed by John Leonetti (who gave us such cinematic gems as Mortal Kombat: Annihilation), James Wan is still clearly the driving force behind the movie, and this is painfully obvious to anyone who has seen Insidious, The Conjuring, or even Dead Silence (a movie about possessed puppets) because it’s just more of the same. You could easily play bingo with the number of horror tropes that pop up throughout the film: possessed child’s toy? Check. Satanic cults? Check. Traumatised parents? Check. And so on and so forth.

In the initial twenty minutes or so there is at least some effort to develop the leads and give the audience something to relate to, but the roles are so blandly acted that there’s very little to praise about them. At the very least they aren’t as hatefully idiotic as most characters in horror movies: that is to say, they don’t deliberately aggravate the un-dead or stride purposefully into a dark forest at night. Even Tony Amendola as the Exorcist-esque priest seems rather bored by the proceedings, even in scenes of intense horror.

The scares are the same old things we’ve seen before, and for a film that markets itself as a horror movie, there are criminally long gaps between scares and the exact number of times the doll itself does anything remotely creepy can be counted on one finger. Jump scares have now become an inevitable part of modern horror and that’s a sign of how lazy the mainstream genre pieces have become. Simply poking someone with a sharp stick isn’t good enough anymore, audiences (even those who don’t ‘like’ horror movies) won’t stand for it anymore because it’s just. not. scary. Although, if it wasn’t for the jump scares, I’d have dozed off within the first half an hour.

Of course once I realised I wasn’t going to be scared my mind started noticing all the other small things going on: the methods of the satanic cult members make no sense, the apparitions don’t really do anything but make some loud noises and stand around in the dark and there’s a very lazy shoe-horning of the Manson murders to try and draw some kind of parallel. Even the cinematography is annoying, an otherwise realistic frame drenched in a drab grey colour filter – another staple of Wan’s work – that just doesn’t need to be there.

Despite being saddled with a producer role, James Wan has his fingerprints all over Annabelle. Any initial promise demonstrated has long since been squandered and the film as a whole is proof that the tired tropes and clichés tied to his work have not only run out of steam but have been abandoned on the rails and left to rust.

1 star