Conjuring: The Beyond (2022) (USA)

⭐️1/2 

Wanda is an annoying young woman who is recently divorced and living with her older brother and his wife. She feels suffocated by all the mooching she’s doing and has a tantrum when he won’t let her take his car for a couple days so she can participate in a sleep study. Being the horrible person she is, she decides to leave in the night before they can talk about it over breakfast and steal the man’s car. He’s outside smoking but decides she can go and do whatever she has to do. So, that was about ten minutes that felt like two hours which was also completely pointless. Wanda Fulcia (ugh) arrives and the quirky characters are marched in at a steady pace. Dr. Richard Pretorious (ugh) leads the group and he may be up to no good. He also sounds like he’s a British man impersonating an American doing a poor impression of an Englishman with problem constipation. Banter mixes with awkward line delivery to form a surreal piece of performance art. The doctor is working on sleep paralysis and how to deal with it. He assures them all that there is no need to worry and he believes in a homeopathic approach to figuring out the issues at the base of sleep paralysis. This exposition goes on forever. The main point is that the doctor plans on hypnotizing his subjects. Wanda isn’t comfortable with this. Skepticism, drinking, psychic abilities, a horrendous sweater, surprise bewbs and more talking fill out the action for the long stretch of time before the hag with monster fingers and red eyes we saw in the opening scene shows up again. Hypnotism works, a door gets opened and strange shit begins to play out. It wastes a bunch of time trudging through dialogue and characters that kind of suck but it believes in itself and I admire that. It also pulls off some solid visuals which have a larger impact because it’s hard to believe that this awkward little bastard of a film was capable at doing anything right. It’s a chore but there’s a few slivers of talent and charming stupidity to keep me from outright crashing… I did doze here and there. No matter how long the J is in the title, please do not go in thinking this has anything to do with The Conjuring movies. As a man who has dipped into the vast, smelly waters of the Amityville extended universe and watched at least twelve “sequels” to Fulci’s Zombi 2, I knew better but judging by the angry IMDb reviews, there are a bunch of stupid people watching horror films. As someone who sat through this, I am also stupid but for different reasons.

A familiar J