You know when you’re cooking and you’re not quite sure how to season something so you just throw everything in the mix and hope for the best? Just throw some Paprika or Cumin or dried oregano on that chicken breast and hopefully everything will work out ok. Salt and pepper? Sure why not, the gangs all here.

Annabelle: Creation is the dark version of that delicious oven roasted chicken breast (maybe some olive oil and thyme will be good too!) there is a tremendous amount of stuff thrown in the mix of this movie, but it all leaves you wishing you had some hot mustard or horseradish for at least some exciting developments.

This movie is a prequel that answers the question no one asked: how did Annabelle turn out to be an evil doll in the first place?

The movie opens as any movie involving an evil doll is legally obligated to: with the doll being made. Ok and I gotta say, I thought originally that the Annabelle doll looked like that because it was evil and full of demons but it was legitimately made to look like that??? maybe it’s one of those therapy dolls they have for kids that have missing limbs so they can see a doll that looks like them, but this is just for tragically ugly children. Either way: Woof. Mr Mullins is hard at work making 100 special edition versions of this thing for SOME REASON. when hes interrupted by his daughter who wants to play hide and seek. After a rousing game he has a tickle fight with his lovely daughter and doting wife. Boy I hope nothing horrible happens to his family.

3 scenes later Annabelle gets WRECKED by a passing car and dies. Whoops.

12 years later a sad group of orphans and a kinda hot nun roll up to the Mullins place because he inexplicably agreed to let them stay at his house. I really loved this because from second one he just showed complete and utter disdain for everyone. Welcome to my home you LITTLE PUKES you are PRECIOUS TO ME. It was a real mixed message situation. The group is as follows: two sassy teens, girl with bad haircut, girl with polio, two other ones that I forgot about, and the nun. Bad Haircut and Polio are besties and vow to stay together forever. But much like my buttcheeks after a night of drinking and eating mcdonalds, they are unfortunately destined to be violently separated.  While the nun and the girls are getting unpacked Mr Mullins starts talking to the nun about a photo in her room featuring her and some other sisters in a convent in like Lithuania or something. He’s all “oh who is this?” and points to the photo which then changes to what I can only describe as a hologram style trading card effect that shows a spooky nun in the corner. This of course for those of you not in the know, is a nod to the newest crapfest in the Conjouring universe, The Nun. (review to follow because I hate myself) the Nun is just kinda “oh I dunno” and the fact that a horrible ghoulish woman appeared in a photo is never mentioned again.

Almost immediately Polio tries to get in a the dead daughters locked room of forbidden mystery but Mr. Mullins is like “that stays locked” in the most menacing way possible. He also tells the girls that Mrs. Mullins is JACKED UP after an accident and they wont be seeing much of her. (her reveal was HILARIOUS and I was so excited) Polio discovers the room is unlocked and she enters because shes a kid and kids are dumb and have no sense of their own mortality. She discovers a key locked in a doll house that opens a hidden closet that’s papered with bible verses and crosses and the Annabelle doll is straight chilling in a chair. Polio is understandably spooked by this ugly doll and peaces out but leaves the door unlocked like an idiot. Now I gotta say, if you know you are in possession of an evil doll obsessed with consuming innocent souls why would you A) invite a bunch of children to come live with you and B) not keep a better eye on your horrific possessed object. That’s just lazy. I mean I don’t leave my bong on the kitchen table if I know people are coming over let alone a demon doll.

Things start to go sideways in a hurry now that the doll is rocking around the house. I mean I think it is? They made it pretty unclear as to whether or not the doll could actually walk around. Probably because they knew it would look dumb  as hell. There was a lot of scenes of just nothing really happening paired with the odd spooky jump scare but where the movie really hit its stride is when Polio goes into the dead kids room and sees her ghost against the window. The ghost says she needs help and Polio is all “oh shit with what?” and she turns around and yells “I want…YOUR SOUL!!” while morphing into what I can only describe as a deadite mixed with Manbat from the 90’s Batman cartoon. It was HILARIOUS. I went to see this with the rest of the DIAG crew and we all just started gawking at each other in complete silence at this reveal, it was honestly so funny it was worth the price of admission alone.

So all aboard the exposition express because we’re coming into the station. Turns out that after Annabelle got bashed to pieces by a car, the Mullins prayed for her spirit to come back. Eventually the ghost was like “hey ma can I go inside this doll” and they were like “you sure can honey!” but guess what. it turns out that it wasn’t actually Annabelle but it was an evil spirit. Wowza, I certainly didn’t see that coming. Annabelle then possessed Polio with the help of I guess that evil Nun that was in the photo earlier? This movie seriously just threw in a boatload of monsters, each one more poorly conceived than the last.  Mr Mullins realizes that the doll got out of its closet and hes PISSED. But like, seriously dude, why didn’t you bury the doll in a crate under the ocean or  put it in that warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones or something???  because he did a straight up terrible job of making sure no one fussed with his evil doll.  Annabelle then kills Mr Mullins by breaking all his fingers in an extremely goofy fashion and then I guess just scaring him to death? Bad Haircut tries to stop the doll from possessing Polio and/or killing anyone else by dropping it down a well but then a monster that I guess lives in the well tries to kill her? I honestly don’t know if there was more than one demon or just the one demon because it seemed like it was in several places at once and its motives were extremely unclear.

Mrs. Mullins FINALLY showed us the gross side of her face and let me tell you it was hilarious. She was rocking a weird porcelain phantom of the opera mask for most of the movie and it was not a good look, but then she revealed that the doll had I guess gouged out her eye earlier so she just had a big gaping hole in her face. I guess the best way I can describe the reveal is to liken it to when the new Christopher Nolan Batman movies came out and everyone was like “Oh wow this is a realistic grim movie and not a goofy Batman movies like before!” and then Two Face had that big dumb CGI face with a googly eye and you were like “ok nevermind” It was like that. Also I’m not a doctor but I don’t think covering a big wet open wound with a chunk of porcelain is a great way to promote healing.

So anyways, the nun is like “we gotta boogie!!” and tells all the girls to go find somewhere safe to hide while they wait for the police to show up. All the girls decide to go rescue Mrs. Mullins but wouldn’t you know it! someone has ripped her in half and tacker her top half to the wall. The bottom half remains at large. So after spazzing out at that, they run into the yard where one is attacked in a barn by a scarecrow because why not. So I think this is the same Annabelle demon the whole time but like I said it seems like it would be in several different areas at once and it used a variety of costumes and set changes for the drama of it all. Finally after a lot of jump scares and bad CGI jump scares, the nun and bad haircut trick Annabelle and Polio back into the hidden closet where bad and naughty possessed girls must atone for their sins. What a night.

The next morning the cops show up and I have no idea how anything got explained to them. I don’t know how they explained Mr. Mullins death, how Mrs. Mullins got ripped in half, or how everything in the house got so destroyed. They look for approx. 5 minutes for Polio and then the cop just declares “I’m sure she will turn up” but I mean she is an orphan so no one is really looking for her. The Nun is apparently satisfied with this conclusion and they all drive away.

12 years later it turns out Polio got adopted by a family who was then the family at the beginning of the first Annabelle movie that she killed because she was in an evil cult. This made little to no sense for several reasons. Was she just possessed by the demon for all those years and then joined an evil cult even though she was already a possessed woman with a demon inside of her? wouldn’t it make more sense if she was running the cult? And then in the first Annabelle movie, she slits her throat over the doll version of Annabelle and then possessed the doll again. Why would you leave a human body to go back into a doll like some sort of reverse Chucky situation??? And she didn’t acknowledge that she had ever seen the doll before that moment? This movie was bad is what I’m trying to get at. But on the plus side I did get a Sprite and a big bag of popcorn at the theater so I mean..win/win(?)

Final Thoughts:

-have you ever owned a hideous doll?

-would you pray to the dark forces to get your dead kid back?

-would you ever let a bunch of orphans live in your home?

-I would but only if they were old tymey street urchins

-I would insist they greeted everyone by saying “Oy Mista!”

-Oh they could clean my chimney too

-I need to get my hands on some orphans

You can find Rigby on twitter looking for her new family of orphans and papering the walls in pages from the Bible.