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 Annabelle 

What grade would you give this film?
A 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
B 25%  25%  [ 2 ]
C 50%  50%  [ 4 ]
D 25%  25%  [ 2 ]
F 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
Total votes : 8

 Annabelle 
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Post Annabelle
Annabelle

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Annabelle is a 2014 American supernatural horror film directed by John R. Leonetti, produced by James Wan, and written by Gary Dauberman. It is both a prequel to and spin-off of The Conjuring. The film stars Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, and Alfre Woodard. The film will be released worldwide on October 3, 2014.


Thu Oct 02, 2014 3:41 pm
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Post Re: Annabelle
Definitely not as bad as I was expecting but obviously not as great as The Conjuring which I found to be one of the best horror movies of the last ten years. It actually had quite a few effective moments and the set up with the home invasion was actually great. It got downhill in the third act, which was actually quite embarrassing and had no tension whatsoever. Part of the issue was that the characters were written so thinly it was hard to care about them at all. The direction was quite good though and like I said, there was a fair amount of tension until the third act.

B-

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Thu Oct 02, 2014 9:52 pm
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Post Re: Annabelle
Someone tell me how it ends. There's no way they kept the ending from the test screening.


Fri Oct 03, 2014 8:15 pm
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Post Re: Annabelle
Ah, yes, I have been curious about what ending you have seen. The one I have seen ends with Alfre Woodard sacrificing herself by jumping out of the window, so that the baby re-appears. The demon gets his soul and the couple gets rid of the doll, which later appears in a shop, ready to be bought by someone else.

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Fri Oct 03, 2014 8:34 pm
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Post Re: Annabelle
They kept the magical black lady sacrifices herself ending?!? Everyone in the focus group hated it!

My cut ended with her death. Camera moves outside the window to find her corpse and the doll on the pavement. Close-up on Annabelle's eye as the cult symbol (very) faintly appears. The end.


Sat Oct 04, 2014 12:15 am
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Post Re: Annabelle
This may end up a decidedly minority opinion, but I consider Annabelle on par with The Conjuring, the mega-hit film to which it functions as a type of prequel. This refers to both its qualities and also its flaws. Annabelle is, of course, the frightening, filthy, and partly fractured doll introduced in the prologue of the James Wan film last year upending the lives of a group of nurses with bump-in-the-night torments and an implacable dead-eye stare. This Rosemary's Baby-style film traces the doll's road from purchase to the nurses' apartment, including the story of how it became possessed in the first place. Terrorized are Mia and John (the fantastic Annabelle Wallis and the relative dunderhead Ward Horton), a friendly and expecting couple living in Southern California at the height of post-Manson-family cult paranoia. Alfre Woodard turns in a fine performance, too, as a helpful and wise neighbor who is also haunted, albeit by the past rather than Satan.

The film, which ultimately finds the heroine questioning her sanity and investigating the supernatural in the space of an apartment, not only lifts themes and stylistic cues from Rosemary's Baby, but also from a tragic chapter in the personal life of the iconic film's director, Roman Polanski. It is hard not to recall the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and her peers by Manson adherents during one of Annabelle's most frightening sequences, a home-invasion set piece culminating in mother-to-be Mia contending with a knife-wielding female cult member. I am not sure it is in the best taste, but it is involving and spine-tingling and shot with winding-camera aplomb. Indeed, there are many instances of dynamic suspense and demonic intrigue on hand here, including a moment involving a non-moving elevator which perfectly builds in both dread and sheer frustration. Alas, as with The Conjuring, a dose of heavy-handed sentimentality and spirituality undermines and softens the frights, particularly in the uneven and slightly abrupt third act.

B

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Sat Oct 04, 2014 1:49 am
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Post Re: Annabelle
David wrote:
This may end up a decidedly minority opinion, but I consider Annabelle on par with The Conjuring


I certainly hope so.

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Sat Oct 04, 2014 11:15 am
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Post Re: Annabelle
The Dark Shape wrote:
They kept the magical black lady sacrifices herself ending?!? Everyone in the focus group hated it!

My cut ended with her death. Camera moves outside the window to find her corpse and the doll on the pavement. Close-up on Annabelle's eye as the cult symbol (very) faintly appears. The end.


They added a shot of Woodard's corpse with Annabelle magically disappeared, and a "SIX MONTHS LATER" epilogue with the happy family at church with the priest, and then Annabelle being bought by a new, unsuspecting family.

But no, the ending is still awful. I think my grade dropped a whole letter grade when I realized that the lovely, talented, magnetic Alfre Woodard was in the movie entirely to sacrifice herself for the bland pretty WASP couple's baby. Coupled with the film's early fear of hippies and the Changing Scary World of the '60s, it makes the whole movie look even more horribly, weirdly regressive.

All that said, the experience of watching it at a midnight screening with a full crowd was pretty fun. The sequence of her trying to escape the apartment's basement was damned terrifying. And Annabelle Wallis might have a future outside of this movie. But those bits and Woodard's performance are really all this had going for it.


Sat Oct 04, 2014 11:34 am
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Post Re: Annabelle
I enjoyed the retro occult paranoia. It evokes such films as Eye of the Devil, Race with the Devil, etc. Or even The Wicker Man. There obviously was a real and strong dynamic in the 1960s where more square people were fascinated by and deeply afraid of this media-heightened conceptualization of the cults in their midst. Saying this film is "regressive" for toying around with this idea fifty years later is goofy.

And the couple are not WASPs. They are Catholic...

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Sat Oct 04, 2014 2:40 pm
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Post Re: Annabelle
This was not very good. Really bland and not scary. The doll was the scariest part of The Conjuring and I was excited when it was announced it would be getting its own movie. But man if they managed to make this doll not even remotely scary here. It didn't have any of the atmosphere that helped make The Conjuring creepy. This felt like a cheap cash-in. Like a Direct-to-DVD sequel. It does have a couple of very minor effective creepy moments yet neither of them really even involve the doll. I didn't expect this to to be on the level of The Conjuring. Just wanted a fun horror movie. Unfortunately Annabelle did not deliver.

There was an adorable baby in it though. :P

Oh, and talk about movies with baffling ratings from the MPAA. This in no way should be an "R" movie. If the first Insidious managed a PG-13 rating there's nothing in this that should get it such a restricted rating.


5/10 ( C )


Mon Oct 06, 2014 2:35 am
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Post Re: Annabelle
Starts ok, gets really stupid, and very unscary. Sorry to the mom in this film, but anyone that collects not one, but an entire set of creepy 4 foot dolls deserved what happened. Also the 14 year old girls in my showing screaming uncontrollably any moment the doll was on screen made this one of the most miserable experiences ever. Never again for a Friday night at a theater for a horror film.

D

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Mon Oct 06, 2014 4:05 pm
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Post Re: Annabelle
Eh talk about a lazy cash grab. The best scare comes more than half way through the movie and the rest is just so painfully boring. Yes I thought The Conjuring was overrated, but I was actually interested in this because I thought the doll itself was pretty fucking creepy and well used in that movie.

This could honestly be any of the millions of cheap DTV horror flicks you see at the Redbox, and that's sad to say because the doll deserved a much better movie than this.


Sun Oct 12, 2014 1:26 am
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Post Re: Annabelle
yeah, this was not good. The Conjuring is surely better even though I didn't really like that film either. I thought things were gonna get really interesting when
Spoiler: show
you think the lead pretty much beat her baby
but nah.


Sun Oct 12, 2014 3:58 am
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Post Re: Annabelle
ANNABELLE

This film isn't as good as the Conjuring but it does have it's moments. I must give it that. I thought the film could have been more memorable with a better cast. The parents are just not very engaging to me. I did think the opening intro to how Annabelle became imbued was scary, but after that the film took quite a while to get to the best sequence in the film. The bit where she's in the basement storage and trying to use the elevator. That goes on for about 10 minutes it seems and it was gold. I had to look away a lot. There's one last bit toward the end but overall I thought the film was low on scares and not up to the quality of the film it was spun from.

Grade - B

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Sun Oct 12, 2014 1:39 pm
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Post Re: Annabelle
I still can't believe how horrible the ending of this was. :P

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Mon Oct 13, 2014 8:47 am
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Post Re: Annabelle
Te lead looked so much like Elizabeth Mitchell that I found it very distracting. Half of the movie I was thinking it was her.

And whatever the movie has some nice parts.

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Thu Oct 23, 2014 12:36 am
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Post Re: Annabelle
Creepy doll.... that's pretty much it.

C-/D+


Thu Oct 23, 2014 1:57 am
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Post 
Annabelle

It is strange that this is an R-rated horror. It felt like a PG-13 horror with its cuts, minimal dread, and lacking scares. It's even stranger to think that horror genious James Wan allowed this to be pass with his name attached. Horrendous acting by Annabelle Wallis and a ludicrous plot. I counted around 5 scares in the whole film, and those weren't even effective (nor built upon). I watched it in a dark room, late at night, with utter silence, and I went to sleep like a baby. For a horror to work as it's supposed to, I should not have had such a nice night's sleep. It is just a plainly written modern horror film. They all mainly follow the same formula, but this one actually insults us because it blatantly forces us to care about these characters by putting in some cliché and yucky scenes that show them as nice, decent, caring Americans, which just comes across as fake and clunky.

D+

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