Insidious (James Wan, 2010)

Saw director Wan won't be inspiring any imitators with this one, which may be no bad thing considering the deluge of torture-porn that has followed his 2004 breakthrough film. This is basically a mish-mash of Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror, with the usual middle-class family haunted by malevolent forces after their comatose son. The wife is the hysterical one who has to convince her bloody-mindedly sceptical husband that she's not losing her marbles, then there's a campy seance and the father finally faces up to the evidence of his own eyes to go and rescue his son's soul from the underworld. It's not badly assembled by any means, just that the raw materials are so stolid. The chief virtue of it all has to be the frugal $1.5m budget.

4/10