Insidious: Chapter 2

Insidious, which I wrote a brief note about after seeing it saying that it started well but made the mistake of showing its ghosts and demons too often and too clearly and thus lost all of its tension, was a decent but ultimately disappointing film. However, it did well enough to spawn that staple of relatively low-budget horror: a sequel. And I must say, while similarly flawed, Insidious 2 was probably more consistently enjoyable and had some excellent moments, including a Back-to-the-Future-Part-II sequence tying into the first film that genuinely put a smile on my face, wrapped up by a similar treatment for this film’s prologue. Add in that pretty awesome old lady from the first film – sadly used for some dodgy Sixth Sense scene as a cliffhanger for a third ‘chapter’ already in the works – and you have something quite satisfying.

Which isn’t to say it’s good. The jumps are still very artificial, the ghosts’ powers vague and the lack of adequate lighting anywhere is somewhat tedious. It’s certainly nothing new, and most of the evil ghosts we’ve seen in horror since the 80s have had a tragic backstory about an abusive parent forcing a child into murder or some such – here with added ‘trap’…though this isn’t anime, of course. As horror sequels go, though, this is certainly one of the better ones, and I’d rather rewatch this than the original. 

(Another theatre review because of my lack of a theatre blog...)

Yesterday’s theatre trip to see Siro-A (ie, stylised, 白- A, or ‘White A’) was well worth the trip. The troupe of Japanese performers – five dancers, an electro DJ and a visual programmer – work their short but intensive set around a projector, and take the concept of interacting with light to great heights of precision-planning and cleverness. There were hints of tiredness about the show, with a rather less-than-full audience after an extended run in the Leicester Square Theatre and slight hints from the performers that they had been doing this same routine for a good few years – though the long beaky masks in most of their videos from Japan seem to have vanished. Part of what made everything work, though, was how extremely well-practiced it was, so seeing it after long months of repetition was no bad thing. The show kicked off with a fine example of cleverness, with the dancers holding up small boards to ‘catch’ areas of the stage-wide projection, then being able to interact with them, moving as they moved, combining them, pretending to knock them into each other, etc. Comedy was obviously going to be a big part of the act, with a typically ad-absurdium introduction for group leader Toshinori Abe that went beyond any typical resume to include his house on Google Maps, his entire family and even ex-girlfriends. Other ideas for the projection included shadow interaction with balls (the Japanese love shadow manipulation theatre – one game show we watched over there was ‘look at the performers and guess what their shadows will look like on a screen’), playing about with a hole that had some pretty brilliant surprise use of props, projecting onto a T-Shirt (and then having the performers mimic famous brands), imitating computer games, and a rather beautiful dance with ‘peacock’ psychedelic trails emanating from a pre-recorded version of the dance that ran near-perfectly behind the performer.

While the projections were ever centre-stage, it wasn’t just pre-made sequences performed in conjunction with a pre-made projector. Other sections included using real-time linked video and projection, including the first part where they turned the camera onto the audience and stuck their faces into various silly pictures. Of course, I was the first to be picked on, but was pretty amused when they made me into Superman. Another great use of the technology was to put two separate performances together in split-screen. The divided dance didn’t work brilliantly, but using the top half of one guy and the pictures the other brought out ended up hilarious, with centaurs and mermaids being topped off by the guy with the pictures using his hands for little ballerina legs. So funny. In other parts, they used audience interaction to create a very silly version of ‘We Will Rock You’ and pictures taken as the audience came in to have them almost ‘dancing’. It was at times close to the somewhat awkward English comedy club style of audience interaction, but somehow the theatricality of these stylised performers made them too otherworldly to find irritating – the same effect as with the Blue Man Group.

Funny, charming and clever, it was definitely money well spent.