Looks like Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson’s run playing ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren comes to an end with The Conjuring: Last Rites (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video). The fourth Conjuring – the ninth entry in the sprawling “cinematic universe” that includes the Nun and Annabelle movies – was a wild success, grossing $460 million worldwide, apparently before word got out that it’s a dead snooze. Some of the other movies in this deeply silly cinematic universe that insists the films are Based On A True Story (the Warrens were real-life supernatural “experts” who were most likely hucksters) weren’t too bad, and somewhat memorable for their period detail, jump scares and sense of humor, but this one? It’s a one-way trip to Slog City.
The Gist: What kind of night was the night of April 20, 1964? Dark and stormy, of course! Ed and a pregnant Lorraine are early in their career as supernatural investigators. What are they supernatural-investigating? An old-timey mirror with a wood-carved frame featuring three creepy baby heads at the crest. Lorraine looks deep into the glass and a bunch of the stuff of lame and shitty horror movies happens: whooshing noises, vague whispering, rumbles, groans, canted angles, etc. It’s pretty clear this is an attack of Bad Juju. So bad, the glass cracks and Lorraine goes into labor early. Ed rushes her to the hospital and the Juju follows them. Weird things happen that I won’t spoil and then we get images of the Warren family raising their daughter, all happy halcyonic stuff except maybe the little incantation Lorraine teaches little Judy to recite, to ward off whatever restless spirits might be on the periphery of their existence. “I keep seeing horrible things and they won’t go away!” the girl weeps, because she apparently is like her mother, and sensitive to a bunch of other stuff of lame and shitty horror movies, like fleeting visions of pastyfaces in the corner of the frame or whatevers bumping around in one of the neighboring rooms, and all that.
Now it’s 1986 and we meet the Smurl family in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. Nice churchgoing group here: Mom, dad, two teenage daughters, younger twin daughters, grandma and grandpa, all living in a modestly spacious blue-collar house with a creepy basement and a creepy attic and lots of wood floors that creak like the dickens. None of them is much of a character, but I’ll at least ID Heather (Kila Lord Cassidy), who celebrates her First Communion and is given the worst gift in the world by her grandparents: An old-timey mirror with a wood-carved frame featuring three creepy baby heads at the crest. It’s even broken, which is a clue that it’s the same mirror the Warrens “encountered” and not just some mass-produced old-timey mirror with a wood-carved frame featuring three creepy baby heads at the crest that you can buy at any ol’ Hobby Lobby. Grandma is so thrilled to share that they got it at a swap meet. Apparently she believes it’s the perfect thing to give to a 15-year-old girl, when almost anything else would be better. It’s at this point we arrive at the conclusion that Grandma sucks.
The mirror’s arrival marks the beginning of some capital-P Phenomena: Birthday candles blowing themselves out, light fixtures crashing on dinner tables, a weirdo in cadaverface and overalls manifesting in the basement, one of the teenagers puking up blood, etc. Elsewhere, the Warrens are at the tail end of their popularity as apparition chasers. You may recall from The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It that Ed had a heart attack, so in subsequent years he and Lorraine chilled out on making house calls, instead trying out the lecture circuit. Their latest stop draws an embarrassingly skimpy number of university students, the bulk of whom laugh in their faces and ask, “So you guys are kinda like the Ghostbusters?” Judy (Mia Tomlinson) is now in her early 20s and gearing up to introduce her parents to her new boyfriend, Tony (Ben Hardy). Tony’s surprise is, he has a ring in his pocket. The Warrens’ surprise for him is, they have a room full of haunted objects that you shouldn’t touch, never ever ever never ever. Never. Ever! Don’t do it! I SAID DON’T DO IT. And he doesn’t! But he does join his soon-to-be in-laws as they follow Judy’s intuition to West Pittston to help the Smurls deal with the Phenomena, which happens after more than an hour of this deadass movie has gone by. I mean, we needn’t be in a rush or anything, but this is ridiculous.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: That one movie with the person walking slowly through a haunted house, waiting to be scared. You know. That one. No, not that one. The other one. Right! THAT one!
Performance Worth Watching: Part of the charm of other Conjurings is Wilson’s capacity for one-eyebrow-raised camp humor, which is in distressingly low supply this time around. Bummer.
Memorable Dialogue: Tony bonds with Ed as the veteran spectre chaser makes breakfast for the Smurl family:
Tony: Do you always cook pancakes? Is that part of the process?
Ed, dead serious: Sometimes it’s waffles.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: When The Conjuring: Last Rites isn’t sending a character into a basement so they may walk around slowly, waiting to be scared, or sending a different character into an attic so they may walk around slowly, waiting to be scared, or sending a character different from the first two characters into a bedroom so they may walk around slowly, waiting to be scared, we get some deeply flaccid domestic angst about the things we inherit from our parents. This does not make for a particularly thrilling movie. Perhaps diehard Conjuverse uberzealots will appreciate the callbacks and references to other films in the series, relishing the opportunity to stare deeply into Annabelle’s creepy-doll eyes once again, and appreciating the seemingly dozens of closeups on Farmiga’s troubled, squinched-up face as she psychically detects all kinds of invisible things happening. If so, knock yourself out. The rest of us will be knocked out in a quieter manner – during this bone-dry, 135-minute buttnumbing grind, it took significant wherewithal for me to fight off a near-fatal case of the yawnsies.
The film is sort of structured as parallel stories of families, um, experiencing things. In one thread, it’s ghosts or demons or whatever pestering the Smurls – you’ll get no explanation from me regarding the phenomenon, primarily because the film doesn’t bother to offer one, instead shotgunning a variety of bodily-possession and haunted-house cliches at us willy-nilly, and resolving it in shrugworthy fashion. In the other, the Warrens fuss over their daughter and nice-guy future son-in-law, because they seem destined to take over the family business, Judy having apparently inherited her mother’s clairvoyant powers, with Tony succeeding Ed as, for lack of a better term, the familiar. Perhaps this sets up the future of the franchise, which beancounters will be reluctant to let go considering the big numbers on the receipts; perhaps Judy and Tony will experience the joy of working together as a couple, the satisfaction of helping people rid their lives of metaphysical nonsense and the thrill of being caretakers of a roomful of cursed artifacts that, per Ed’s explanation, would be more dangerous if they didn’t exist than if they did? How does that work again?
We skeptics can set aside the fact that the real-life Warrens had all the credibility of the most pseudo- of pseudoscientists, if the movie is dramatically compelling, with some inventive scares and dollops of humor. (Note that every Conjuring-related film chooses to ignore the debate and controversy surrounding the Warrens’ many extraordinary claims.) I did exactly that with the more entertaining The Devil Made Me Do It, which also was based on a case the Warrens “solved” via exorcisms, prayer and other baloney. But Last Rites, which is content to recycle the same tiresome fodder with mid-’80s needle drops (props for The Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary”!), finds this series’ creative candlewick smothered in a puddle of melted wax. The horror, drama and comedy – wait, there’s no comedy here, I take that back – is all flat as a pancake. And far too often, the movie just waffles.
Our Call: More like The Conjuring: It Bites. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.