I guess I should go on record here: I have never seen the original 'Annabelle' in its entirety...mostly because I fell asleep every time I tried, i.e. it sucked.

So with that out of the way, let's talk about 'Annabelle: Creation'...it sucked too, there you go, that's the short review so many of you always ask me to write.

For the actual readers though, let's dive in. Now, to be completely fair, until the final act, I actually wasn't having a terrible time in this movie. I'm not saying it was ever good, but the plot was at least interesting enough to hold my attention, the tone, although relying way too much on jump scares and fake-outs, was intense enough to at least scare the casual viewer and the acting was more or less what you'd expect from this kind of movie (okay except Lulu Watson, it seems this kid based her entire performance on the filmography of Shawnee Smith; Lulu, take it from me, Shawnee Smith was never a great actress, she was just hot enough for people not to notice). One thing that did bother me throughout was that the film was overall scarier when nothing was happening because as soon as it did...urggg...and that brings me to the final act, what the hell were they thinking?? Seriously, did a 12-year-old write this? Try to picture someone throwing together 'Poltergeist', 'Exorcist' and 'Amityville Horror' and then deciding, no this isn't enough, let's throw some elements of 'Friday the 13th' in there as well. The final act throws at us every bad horror movie cliche that has ever existed, it's not scary, it's not intense, the actors obviously didn't know what to do with it either, because they completely stop trying and overall, what could have been a passable horror film becomes something that took effort to sit through. There were only 6 people in this theatre, and I can say, they were laughing hysterically at how ridiculous this had suddenly gotten, me: I just felt sad. So can I recommend this film? Well, no, not at all. Even though I did find the majority of the film passable, it simply wasn't enough to make up for that final disaster of Roland Emmerich proportion.

*Light spoiler*

One little thing I did enjoy, right at the end, was the inclusion of the original Raggedy Ann doll, which if you know the actual history of Annabelle, was how the original doll actually looked/looks. I'd always thought it was something of a cop-out that they based this franchise around supposedly factual events and then took such a huge liberty by completely redesigning the doll, so I'll give it a very weak high five for that...even though it did throw the franchise's continuity right out the window, but, if this is becoming the standard, then who cares anyway?