Naw, the flick's entitled Jessabelle probably to make people
think of the better Blumhouse flick of the same year, Annabelle (2014 / trailer), or simply 'cause
it's one of the myriad of ways the name (meaning "Wicked,
Wealthy, Beautiful") is spelt in the USA, a land where you're free to
spell names any ol' way since most people can't really spell all that well anyway.
And going by what transpires in this movie, some people can't write horror
movies, either.
Trailer to
Jessabelle:
A Deep South horror flick, Jessabelle, as directed by Kevin
Greutert (Visions [2016 / trailer] and Jackals [2017 / trailer]), one of the
progenitors of the dead-horse-flogging Saw
franchise, and written by Robert Ben Garant (Hell Baby [2013 / trailer] and The Veil [2016 / trailer]), has enough
plotholes that if it were a sieve your pasta would fall through it. The nicely
nasty opening scene, in which the saccharine-sweet declarations of love between
pregger Jessabelle "Jessie" Laurent (Sarah Snook of Predestination [2014 / trailer] and Brother's Nest [2018 / trailer]) and her daddy-to-be
fiancé Mark (Brian Hallisay of Hostel
III [2011 / trailer])
come to an abrupt car-crashing end is probably the most horrifyingly effective
scene in the movie, and the ending is unexpectedly downbeat and thus
commendable, but the problem lies in everything in between. (And that, if you
get down to it, is roughly 85 minutes of the 90-minute running time.) The scares
are generic and almost always expected, and should you actually start to question the developments in the
narrative or the actions of the characters, you might find yourself scratching
your head so hard that you reach your brain.
The basic premise of a young
woman who has lost everything and is now stuck in a wheelchair returning home to
a father she hardly knows only to be confronted with ghosts of the past is,
well, as much a realistically horrifying idea as it is the fodder of TV movies,
which this film sometimes feels like. Here, of course, since it's a horror movie, the ghosts of the past are not of a figuratively speaking kind, but real spirits in the night (and day, actually). The concept that ghosts age, however, is
pretty bat-shit out there — does that mean they grow old and die, eventually?
(Where do dead ghosts go, we wonder.) But aging ghosts is a peripheral (and
never mentioned) aspect of the tale told in this movie: a murdered, mixed-race
baby born the same day as white-gal Jessie obviously has aged year for year within the walls
of Jessie's dad's home and in the waters of the adjacent lake, matching Jessie's growth in the corporal world.
Oddly enough, however, going by
how they look when they finally appear in the final scenes of the flick, the
ghosts of Jessie's "mom" Kate (Joelle Carter of Cold Storage [2009 / trailer]) and Kate's
former Afro-American lover Moses (Vaughn Wilson) don't age a day in the
afterlife. Not only that, Moses the Ghost can obviously teleport, for he is the only
ghost to appear far away from the location where he died, rather unlike the now
young-adult Dead Girl with unnaturally immobile boobs (Amber Stevens West, seen below not from the film), who
can take solid enough physical form to beat the shit out of Mr. Former Hometown
Boyfriend Preston (Mark Weber of 13 Sins
[2014 / trailer], Uncanny [2015 / trailer], Green Room [2015 / trailer] and Antibirth [2016 / trailer]) but keeps her
appearances only to the backwater homestead. (Of course, could all the ghosts
of the flick teleport like Moses, then Jessie would never have to had come home
to start experiencing the supernatural.)
The ghosts have other powers,
too. Not only can they smash whiskey bottles while unseen, they can regenerate
the bottles as well, so that for whatever reason, the bottle is back at the bedside again
later on. And they can close doors and latches, the latter
particular handy when it comes to taking an exceedingly late revenge upon Jessie's
"dad", Leon (David Andrews of Cherry
2000 [1987 / trailer]
and Graveyard Shift [1990 / trailer]).
Most amazingly, with a blink of
an eye they can miraculously clean a flooded and ruined bathroom and fully
re-dress Jessie, who seconds before was fighting for her life nekkid in the
tub. (Even odder, not only is she suddenly dressed when the ghost pulls her from the tub, but no one notices that she somehow got dressed and dry while she
was having her screaming fit behind the mysteriously locked bathroom door, not
even the caretaker who had helped put her get nekkid into the bathtub.) And the
ghosts obviously like to clean, too, because when Jessie moves into the old
room of her "mom", which has obviously been closed off since mommy's
death almost two decades earlier, the room is spotless — something neither she
nor Leon find in any way odd.
These and many other sloppy
non-details, combined with the general predictability of the movie (but for its
opening and closing scenes) make Jessabelle
definitely non-essential viewing when it comes to the genre of horror films. On
the plus side, the acting is mostly okay (the actor playing Jessie is actually
and unnoticeably from The Land Down Under),
the locations great, and the direction perfectly competent. In the end,
however, both the talent and the location are basically wasted in Jessabelle, a movie so narratively
stunted and lazy that one wonders how it ever got made, much less released.
Really, we love how, towards the end, Jessie the Rocket Scientist suddenly realizes
everything behind everything and tells it all out loud so that the slower (as
in most) viewers can finally catch on to the what, why, how, when and where of
the events.
One mildly interesting inference
of the flick that is less poorly developed than simply dropped in the viewer's
lap for a few moments during the big closing showdown is that the haunting and ghosts could all be the manifestations of Jessie's
own guilt for surviving the crash that killed her beau and unborn babe as well
as for being unable to help her father when he gets stuck and dies in the
burning shed. But the final scenes beneath the waters of the lake and her last
words to Sheriff Pruitt (character actor Chris Ellis of way too much to mention)
pretty much render that interpretation a big "Nope". Them there be
ghosts, and them ghost don't be nice. And this movie don't be good none, either.
Not from the movie –
Edith Piaf's 1951 version of
Frankie Laine's #2
hit from 1951, Jezebel:
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