The Conjuring 3 — Review Thread

Makes sense. The 2nd is the most over-the-top of the three. James Wan probably had less material to work with and said “fuck it” and went full Evil Dead.

... um... no?


“Hey kids, come chat with this demonic toy.”

......wat?

LOL

This should be Conjuring 4.

I dunno, but it was rad as hell.

What an awful title.

For real.  And haven't there already been like 40 movies with this exact premise?

I get why they tried something by going with that title, given the premise.  But honestly, after seeing the movie and seeing how little the actual court case played into the plot, it just seems even sillier that they did.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It(6/8/2021)

As theaters reopen I have some resolve to see things on the big screen when possible rather than abuse whatever streaming is available… but I was already decidedly in “wait til it’s on home video” territory with the Conjuring franchise and it would have been silly to arbitrarily wait forty five days to give the new one a watch so HBO Max it was. I think it’s safe to say I made the right choice because this probably the weakest of the mainline Conjuring movies to date and is probably a rung below even a couple of the spinoffs. I’ll give the movie this: it starts on a high. In the opening minutes of the movie we get a pretty intense little exorcism scene, which is a nice change of pace from the series usual pattern of beating around the bush for an hour before any substantial horror happens, but it also leaves the rest of the film struggling to top its opening. But the bigger problem here probably has less to do with the horror (though, make no mistake, the horror is quite mediocre) than it is with the story it chooses to tell. The Conjuring franchise is based around the exploits of the real life Ed and Lorraine Warren, a pair of obvious grifters who exploited the popularity of movies like The Exorcist and the Satanic Panic to sell themselves as “demonologists” and ghost hunters. I’ve found the franchise’s glorification of these people to be pretty gross from the beginning but this movie, which deals with a real life murder trial that these hucksters turned into a circus and very much takes their side (including an uncritical invocation of “devil worshipers” its villain while accepting their ludicrous justification for what was plainly a simple murder) in a way I feel borders on irresponsible. Moreso even than the other two films this really feels like it’s targeted at fundamentalist Christians, albeit in a way that’s cannier and more likely to be acceptable to a wider audience than most “faith based films.” The Warrens are figures that should have been left to be forgotten in the 70s and The Conjuring movies probably could have been left back in the 2010s when movies about haunted houses were still thought to be the height of horror cinema.

** out of Five