Highly Overrated But Still Good

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It is a prequel/spin-off of Conjuring and I found it better and scarier than that. I recommend it, but not strongly because it is familiar to those who have seen the Insidious movies, Sinister or Conjuring because they all deals with supernatural forces following families in houses, which seems to be a new sub-genre in haunted house pictures. It's especially appropriate for pregnant women or those with newborns because it deals with evil forces begging to be human again by possessing a baby.

It is certainly not the best horror movie, not special, not great, but certainly not a bad one. Yes, it is full with the cringy dialog, the mediocre acting and a shallow story, but hey, 80 % of the horror genre it's like that today. Since it is a horror movie, for me, it is important that it was scary in many ways and it kept me on the edge of my seat for the whole time, knowing something evil is going to happen in the next 10 seconds. 5-6/10 to be honest, is a fair score, but if you watch it, I don't think you will regret it.

I've been on a Conjuring series binge recently. I enjoyed Conjuring 1 & 2 and rated them both 10/10. This spin off, Annabelle, however... unfortunately this one was kinda weak, not in the same class as the other two. Now I'm just hoping the sequel, Annabelle: Creation, will be an improvement.Something about this one just didn't work that well. I guess, one problem would be that the scares seemed over-reliant on some of the same repeated tricks: flickering lights, or some machine turning on when no one's around, or sounds of a baby crying, or something appearing in the room behind a character. The movie repeated these tricks so often that throughout the movie I actually found myself constantly correctly guessing what kind of trick is going to be coming next.And everything felt a little too static. In other words, motionless, if you know what I mean. The premise does revolve around a doll, of course, but for too much of the time in this movie, the scares are supposed to be coming from nothing that's visibly moving on screen and that just ends up kind of unexciting.There was also a problem with some underdeveloped characters and potential plot lines that go nowhere: The kids on the stairs, the noisy upstairs neighbors, the bookstore owner whose occult connections were barely explained, etc.I should end with some positive though. Annabelle Wallis is pretty good at acting scared and has no hint of her real-life English accent when she speaks, so let's all applaud her acting talents.And the best moment in the movie involved a child running towards a closing door. I won't say anymore, except that it was a great scene and I'm really astonished that they managed to achieve that shot, however they did it.

Released back in 2014, Annabelle is a movie that got a lot of attention in the horror genre. Based off the story of the original Annabelle doll, locked away in a museum for the occult, director John R. Leonetti brings to life one of the most iconic haunted doll stories known in history. I am utterly terrified of dolls, and I think that might have been why I found this film as scary as I did. I was surprise to find it had quite a low rating on IMDb, especially with the sequel just coming out before I watched the film. I fully believe this deserves a slightly higher rating than what it got.First of all, Annabelle Wallis was an absolutely amazing actress and stole the show completely. She did a spectacular job and she was easy to relate to; it was easy to feel the fear she was going through throughout the film – especially the basement scene. Following Annabelle, I am more than eager to go through her filmography and find more of her acting skills. She was just wonderfully talented.Unfortunately, this film does rely on a lot of old tricks of the paranormal genre. The seeing things, the writing on the wall, the demon chase up the stairs, and although terrifying, I would have loved to see more from this that wasn't the same as everything else in the genre. I feel like the directors and script writers could have done a lot more development with this. I am aware they were following the original real life story of Annabelle, but they could have enhanced it, made it a little more scary and not just another trope.There were cons and pros about this, and unfortunately, there were quite a few more cons than there were pros. However, this was still quite a good horror film, for the current age, and I'd definitely recommend this to those who enjoy being spooked.