Once upon a time, there was a doll named Chucky who gave nightmares to kids all over the world. His movie spawned a lot of sequels that ranged from horrifying to horribly hilarious, but gave every kid nightmares, anyway.
Years later, there's "Annabelle." A spinoff from the movie, "The Conjuring," this time, a female doll is psyched to give nightmares to another generation of kids and adults alike.
But did it measure up to the horrors of the murderous doll we grew up with?
Not really.
According to IMDB, "Annabelle" is about a couple who experience terrifying supernatural occurrences involving a vintage doll.
It would have been scary if executed properly, but there just weren't enough terrifying instances in the movie to call it a horror film.
With only a 30% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, critics on the site agreed that "Annabelle borrows unabashedly from better horror films, content to leave viewers with a string of cheap jolts that fail to build on the far more effective The Conjuring."
The New York Daily said that "'Annabelle' is a vortex of visual clichés beyond rescue."
USA Today said, "A couple of jolts don't make for much of a supernatural thriller, and Annabelle has only fleeting jump-in-your-seat moments... Annabelle invites unflattering comparisons with scary movies that came before, but its disparate parts never coalesce into a genuinely fearsome thriller."
It is a "haphazard" screenplay from the screenwriter, Gary Dauberman. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film is "generic and formulaic" but the worst is that the leads were bland in their performance.
That being said, Annabelle is an okay movie to watch, but you can't expect it to be life-changing. It has nothing like the horrors that Chucky has inflicted on children during his reign in the horror movie screen.