Annabelle

That over-sized doll locked behind a glass door comes to life in the oft-silly "Annabelle," now out on Blu-ray. What this "Conjuring" offshoot proves is that you can't just add a popular movie's name to a marketing campaign, especially when a film features a possessed doll.

"Annabelle" shows so much promise in an opening one-shot setup: Mia (Annabelle Wallis), pregnant, gets knifed by a Charles Manson-like gang and director John Leonetti gets to show off his flair for tense filmmaking, using a widescreen shot with various happenings to scare the audience. From there, the film goes straight into the doldrums. Because this is a "Conjuring" prequel, there has to be a haunted house (several of them actually), a gargoyle-looking demon, and a frightened couple who only look and act scared when the script asks them to.

A mish-mash of ideas, including the notorious Manson family, Roman Polanski films (especially "Rosemary's Baby"), and any 1970's haunted house films fills "Annabelle" with fragment and pieces of an unfinished story. Annabelle the doll itself seems to appear in the film for background purposes only.

The same can be said for the Blu-ray's 5 special features, only one of which "Dolls of the Demon" shows how the filmmakers chose the demonic dolls in the film. The other features, "The Curse of Annabelle," "Bloody Tears of Possession," and "A Demonic Process," offer a brief examination of how the movie was made. A seemingly endless succession of 8 deleted scenes can be viewed as well.

"Annabelle"
Blu-ray
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