(Anna’s children are next.) One scene involving a ghostly scalp massage in a bathtub plays like the lame ‘Scary Movie’ parody we used to have to wait a few months for every time the script (by ‘Five Feet Apart’s shameless Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis) suggests a more psychologically complex turn to come, we’re jerked back to its straight line. Widowed social worker Anna Garcia (Linda Cardellini, boringly dutiful) rescues two children locked in a closet by a mentally snapped mom – or so she thinks, until the kids turn up dead in a riverbed, and the culprit, according to their grief-stricken parent, is La Llorona, the supernatural ‘weeping woman’ who drowned her own boys in a 17th-century fit of pique and now steals those of the living. The presence of Annabelle’s chatty Father Perez (Tony Amendola) connects the dots, yet even with a tragic monster straight out of Mexican folklore and a largely Latinx cast (often speaking in untranslated Spanish), ‘The Curse of La Llorona’ feels depressingly familiar and flat. This latest one, ‘The Curse of La Llorona’, may further the brand a bit, but it’s the opposite of frightening: a sludgy collection of tired jump scares, inexpertly mounted period décor – this time we’re in a too-shiny 1973 Los Angeles – and a continued slump into generic blahness. So it’s been a shame to watch the Conjuring-verse (why must everything be a verse?) get diluted by unworthy follow-ups like the ‘Annabelle’ and ‘Nun’ spinoffs. But 2013’s majestically creepy ‘The Conjuring’, a lavish studio movie assembled with floorboard-creaking precision by director James Wan, was an exception – a reminder that, when it wanted to, Big Hollywood could do the genre proud.
If you’re looking for the scariest horror movies of recent years, they’ve been lurking in the shadows: ‘Hereditary’, ‘The Babadook’, ‘The Witch’, ‘The Eyes of My Mother’ and the arrestingly weird ‘Suspiria’ are all the products of indie visionaries spinning their relatively small budgets into gold.
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