Sometimes it can be frustrating watching films for review. I really hoped against hope that Conjuring: The Beyond would turn out to be an entertaining movie, even if the title alone made me feel like this would be a middling horror hoping people would mistakenly associate with The Conjuring series. Sadly, this Calvin Morie McCarthy (Amityville Poltergeist) written and directed film was a snooze-fest from start to finish, perhaps fitting seeing as it is all about sleeping.
Having been staying at the home of her sister ever since her divorce, Wanda (Victoria Grace Borrello) is being heavily pressured to leave. With no source of income and nowhere else to stay, she decides to volunteer herself for a sleep study that Dr. Richard Pretorious (Steve Larkin - Mutant Vampires from the Planet Neptune) is carrying out, as in addition to being paid for the experiment, she will also be provided food and a place to sleep during it. She ends up at a former school, and meets three other volunteers, Porter (Jon Meggison - A Haunting in Ravenwood), Theo (Tim Coyle - A Haunting in Ravenwood) and Margo (Cross Hollow). Pretorious tells the group that his experiment involves giving them sleep paralysis, something which has plagued him for years. He hopes to try and learn more about the condition by studying how it affects the volunteers. While the experiment works, it also has more sinister side effects, as one by one, those afflicted with sleep paralysis begin to disappear overnight after witnessing a type of evil spirit.
After a so-so prologue in which a creepy witch type creature (Chynna Rae Shurts - Cross Hollow) drags a man suffering sleep paralysis from his bed, we are then introduced to Wanda. It is then a further thirty minutes before the horror finally begins, with this first third being the set-up of how Wanda and the others came to be at the experiment. I thought the idea of a creature which is only able to interact with people suffering sleep paralysis was pretty good. I had hoped for fun A Nightmare on Elm Street style shenanigans from the creature, causing all sorts of interesting dream sequences for each person targeted. Instead the film remains really quite dull. The victims aren't killed, they are instead dragged off camera, each one plays out the same way. This made the horror feel quite stale, and with a low body count (if you can describe people vanishing as having died), a film that felt uneventful. By the time it got to the third act not a lot had happened at all, with the more interesting characters gone it was up to the remaining bland ones to figure things out. One positive is the way this finally ends, I appreciated how it culminated at least.
The witch creature looks decent enough, not outstanding make-up design, but it worked within the film. Less interesting was what it does, that is just sort of lurk around trying to look scary. With barely any explanation of what is happening, no logical attempt to stop the horror from happening, and a forever sedate pace, Conjuring: The Beyond was unfortunately really not very exciting. I found the simple story hard to follow, and there were only a couple of decent characters (namely Larkin's Pretorious who stole his scenes unopposed, and his dodgy assistant, who sadly only featured in three short scenes).With a lot of the film taking place at night it also meant this was visually dark, while the school setting was sparse on any kind of set detail.
I feel that perhaps it was a low budget that prevented this from being more entertaining. It was also low ideas though, there needed to be some variation, rather than having each scene of horror playing out near identically. There also needed to be more explanation of what was going on, as it felt the protagonists were making up solutions as they went along. It all culminated to make for a lethargic movie that felt pretty pointless. There was promise here for sure, it just never once came to any kind of fruition. Conjuring: The Beyond released on DVD and Digital, VOD platforms on September 13th from Breaking Glass Pictures. If you are after a vaguely more entertaining horror about sleep paralysis then check out Dead Awake.
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