Regardless, I still want a water-bed.
This may be the best Conjuring film in terms of lighting/coloring (as long as it isn’t a daytime shot) and Michael Chaves can mime James Wan’s style all he wants while even surprisingly adding to it with a few instances of mild creativity, but it’s not enough to save the biggest snooze-fest of 2021 thus far. The biggest offense that I can claim when it comes to The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is that it completely eradicates a potential-driven premise that smartly sets itself up from being a redundancy within the confines of its previous two entries only for it to seemingly do everything in its path to not evolve this premise into something remotely engaging, transfiguring into exactly what it initially sought out to not become. Mark Kermode delivered one of my new favorite reviewer quotes not long ago when he went over Zack Snyder’s Justice League, calling it “competently boring”, and that description very much applies to how I felt about this third Conjuring installment. It’s not too convoluted, but more importantly, however, it’s just dead air, a walking corpse — excuse my cheesy wording, but that sort of vocabulary is in spirit of the run-of-the-mill movie we have under speculation here! There’s just not a whole lot to say about it that hasn’t already been said about countless other horror stinkers alike!
And yeah, the twist this time around is goofy as hell, and the movie going full Interstellar (2014) “love conquers all” with that tiresome mind-control cliché certainly ended up being the killing points that ruined the climax for me. I swear though, circumstances such as this really get me thinking about how these r-rated Conjuring movies are slowly becoming more and more like Scooby-Doo episodes. But… now that I mention it, if they had compacted this storyline into a tight 70-minutes, toned its carnage down a little bit, ultimately making it into some kind of cartoon special for that iconic children’s franchise, it probably would’ve ended up being a better experience. Awe shucks! Why didn’t that happen instead???
Verdict: D+
“The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It” is now playing in theaters and available to stream on HBO Max.
Burning the Celluloid 
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