[Bonus Preview] The Conjuring: Last Rites

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Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to a special review episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a serviceable fourth entry in a perhaps long-in-the-tooth franchise, debatable.

We'll debate it tonight.

As always, I am Chris Winnerbauer, joined by my fearless co-host, Lizzie Bassett.

Lizzie, does the power of Christ compel you?

Compelled me to walk my butt to the movie theater and see the conjuring.

You and a lot of other people.

Yeah.

I know it's doing very well.

Yeah.

So Chris and I did go and see the fourth installment in the,

well, it's technically like the 800th installment.

Yeah.

It's the fourth direct installment in the Conjuring franchise titled The Conjuring Last Rights.

Before we get into this, Chris, do you know the little fun fact that was recently revealed about the Annabelle doll, which is, of course, tangentially related to this franchise and appears even in this movie?

The real Annabelle doll?

The real one, yeah.

The one that looks like a raggedy ass and not like the real.

No, I don't.

I don't know what was revealed.

Please let me know.

Matt Rife, comedian, in air quotes,

bought the Warrens house and is now the legal guardian of the Annabelle doll, which is the most interesting thing that.

I've heard about him.

Good for you, Matt Reif.

I don't know what he's doing with it, but he bought it.

Well, it's uh, wish, wish him the best.

Wish Annabelle the best.

Honestly,

things took things just took a bad turn for Annabelle as Annabelle is stuck listening to Matt Reif practicing his material before he goes up on stage.

She got what she deserved.

Yeah, exactly.

The one thing that can defeat Annabelle is Matt Reif's comment.

I mean, I'm not a fan of him, but at the same time, if you're going to spend your rich person money on something, why not buy the Annabelle doll in the World's House?

Go for it, sir.

Why not destroy it?

Why?

I don't think he's going to.

All right.

So, just a little bit of basic info about this movie.

And then I just want to hear some spoiler-free thoughts.

And just so you know, folks, we are going to keep the spoilers and the more in-depth conversation, which I think will be an interesting one today in the paywalled portion of this episode.

So, if you listened to the first half, you like it, you want to hear more, just head on over to Patreon.

And if you are a $5 a month subscriber, you get access to all of our bonus episodes, of which there are usually at least two a month.

So go ahead and head over there and keep listening if you would like to.

And if you hate it, that's fine.

All right.

So this was directed by Michael Chavez, written by Ian Goldberg, Richard Nang.

Sorry if I mispronounced that.

And David Leslie Johnson McGoldrick.

Of course, based on characters by two other people who we will get to.

The Hayes.

The Hayes Rose, starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ben Hardy, who we just talked about in Bohemian Rhapsody.

I thought thought he was great in this.

Mia Tomlinson, and an absolute rogues gallery of past haunting victims, which is fun.

As always, the IMDb log line is paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren take on one last terrifying case involving mysterious entities they must confront.

And Chris, as of this taping, Last Rights has blown past expectations for its preview ticket sales, tracking towards a potential record high for the franchise, which is currently the highest grossing horror franchise ever.

At, do you know how much?

The franchise or whatever for the movie?

The franchise total.

Including all spin-offs?

Is it over 2 billion now?

You bet your butt it is.

It is $2.3 billion.

Globally.

Because I saw this weekend, I think they're looking $190 worldwide.

Is what they did.

The last number I saw.

Really?

And yes.

And this,

everybody rightfully yell at me as I say this.

Chris, this was the easiest thing in the world to predict, but I did predict that this movie was going to be huge.

And that's why I suggested we should do a review about it, because obviously we've covered the conjuring before.

I just, people love these movies.

I know.

I'm really.

Part of the conversation I want to have today is I have a lot of theories as to why people love these movies.

Apart from the fact that they're just generally enjoyable.

So there's nothing wrong with that.

They are generally enjoyable movies.

They are well made.

Should we dive into spoiler-free thoughts, Lizzie?

Yes, I would love to hear your spoily-free thoughts on the conjuring Last Rides.

Okay, so spoiler-free, this film felt like,

overall, more of a return to form

of the first two films.

The third felt like a departure.

That is, I believe,

kind.

Yes.

It became a weird courtroom movie.

But...

The structure of conjuring movies is really unique in both generally speaking and within the horror sub the horror genre.

Specifically, the conjuring movies are very long, as you know, Lizzie.

This movie is two hours, 15 minutes.

I believe they are all at right about two plus hours.

And this is a genre littered with the corpses of 80 to 100-minute films.

And so

if you notice, conjuring movies eschew like a normal Act 1 lock-in because the Warrens never engage with the haunting victims until the midpoint of the film.

Conjuring Conjuring one does that, Conjuring 2 does that, and Last Rights does that.

So for an hour, you're tracking two parallel storylines.

Yes.

And although,

which we'll get to, I think the first movie is the only one where I think the focus is arguably on the family.

Exactly.

So they split their time maybe 60-40 on

the Ron Livingston, Lily Taylor.

70-30.

Yeah.

Exactly.

In the first film.

So

the Act 1 lock-in is the recognition, we are being haunted, right?

Roughly 30 minutes in.

You are emotionally invested with that family.

Exactly.

By this film, I think the studio has wisened to the fact that Ed and Lorraine Warren are the stars, and their personal lives have become very much the meat of these movies.

And so my spoiler-free review is: I actually really liked the first 40 to 45 minutes of this movie.

I thought it was very well done.

I agree.

And then we hit a real slow mid-section that just, and again, good performers, great production design.

The cinematography is assured.

The direction, I think, is strong.

The story just, you're just waiting for them to get to the haunted house at a certain point.

And we know where we're going.

Notice how the conjuring, unlike other horror films, is not set up around a central question as to what is happening.

Everybody knows what's happening.

The question is, how are these folks going to deal with it?

And this movie, I think, suffers some pretty bad pacing problems midway through that last a good 45 minutes.

And then I think it finishes with a fun

logic be damned third-act set piece that's again very well executed and left me leaving the theater feeling, hey, that was a fun movie.

But I do think it, this movie,

by virtue of the structure they've established with the storylines here, and now being committed to the Warrens,

they've dug themselves into a hole.

And you really feel the pain of that for that middle 45 or so of this movie.

I agree.

I think that's a very fair review of this movie.

I too enjoyed it.

I don't think any of the movies in this franchise have come anywhere near the first one,

which I think is one of the best horror movies ever made.

I love it.

I think it's fantastic.

I think the demise of this franchise is that they have pivoted to focus on the Warrens.

And we're going to talk a lot about that today because boy is that an interesting decision when you get into some of the historical America's sweethearts.

America's sweethearts.

And you're going to have to go past the paywall to find out why they're not.

Well, or go listen to our episode on The Connect.

No, no, no.

Make them pay, just like the Warrens did.

Just like I was going to say, exactly.

Learned from your favorite snake oil salesman, the Warrens.

Yeah.

Yes.

So I don't want to say right at the top, I think all of the actors in this movie are fantastic.

I think Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga

are wonderful and they are just doing incredible work without being given very much.

Those characters on the page, I think, could be so saccharine and almost unwatchable.

And they are just

incredibly engaging, beginning to end.

I really enjoyed Mia Tomlinson as their daughter and Ben Hardy as her significant other.

I thought that they were great.

As you can probably tell by the title, this is meant to function in theory as the final film starring Patrick Wilson and Pharmiga as Ed and Lorraine Warren.

But does that mean this is the end of the conjuring cinematic universe?

No.

No.

Hell no.

It makes billions of dollars.

So there's no way.

Matt Reif's next stand-up special is going to be part of the conjuring

ventriloquism act with the NFL Dahl.

That would be great, actually.

I hope he does that.

Try to cancel me, bitch.

So back in 2023, there was discussion of an HBO series.

I wasn't totally able to figure out where that stands.

And then, of course, there is the possible move into a phase two of these films as well.

I do not think they're going to drop this franchise.

Although my guess is that Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson are like, I'm tired.

And they may be exiting stage left and who can blame them?

And I think perhaps, That might be for the better for this franchise.

So, Chris, I want to do just a little reminder for folks that have not listened to our episode of sort of where, where this came from.

Ed and Lorraine Warren were self-taught demonologists.

Lorraine was a self-professed medium as well.

But the Conjuring movie franchise began with a producer named Tony DeRosa Grund, who had managed to befriend the real-life Ed and Lorraine Warren.

And he was particularly taken by a tape that Ed had played him of a theoretically demonically possessed Carolyn Perrin, who you may remember is played by Lily Taylor in the original film.

Of course, he spied something that smelled like money and had leveraged his personal relationship with the Warrens to acquire the film rights to a number of their cases.

So remember, all of the movies in the Contring franchise are the Warrens cases.

They're quote unquote.

They're real cases.

So he ends up filing for bankruptcy.

There is more on that in our episode because this man's financials are a disaster.

But New Line Cinema then jumped in, basically jumped into his estate sale, essentially, and snapped up the rights that he had to the Warren's cases.

So they decide to stick with the Perrin family with the first case.

And that's the first movie, which in my opinion is very smart.

It's one that did not gain a ton of media attention.

Several other Warren cases did, which we will get to in a few minutes.

And it's one that the surviving Perrin family members pretty much stand by.

It's also a pretty simple haunted house story.

Chris, what's your take on the first conjuring movie versus sort of where it goes from there?

So the first one, I think, does a really good job of sticking to the simple escalating poltergeist logic that it sets up.

And it does, and there are some really good scares in the first one.

Great scares that are established that are clear.

homages and echoes of the first film.

So the first film has the clapping game, for example.

Which is so good.

And it's very good.

The fourth film, I think, very lovingly does lift from a number of horror classics.

But the first film, what it does really well is it establishes this is a family dealing with economic hardship.

This is a family that's stressed.

This is a family on the edge.

And all it takes is one tapping ghost.

to tip them over.

And it does a good job of explaining why a family might be unable economically to flee a situation where they're dealing with a pesky ghost, for example.

And it does that by showing versus telling, which I think this one was very guilty of doing.

And so the first film, because it stays within that logic, and then it does eventually escalate into a possession film by the end,

it avoids some of the traps of dream logic, or it was all in my head, or now I'm waking up, that the later films start to step into.

And candidly, the more like slenderman-esque trappings of the second film, for example, or the full-blown hysteria of witch trials in the third film that they kind of shop in here.

It feels very contained.

It feels very intimate.

And it's really driven by Lily Taylor's performance.

I mean, yes, Vera and Patrick Wilson as well, but it's a chamber piece.

It is.

And also just the fact that they cast Lily Taylor and Ron Livingston as those parents, that's your indication right there that the focus of that movie is actually at least as much on that family because those are

the things that they set up there.

Yes, I agree.

So they brought on twin brothers, Chad and Carrie Hayes, who were coming off of House of Wax and a few other low-budge horror movies of the early aughts.

James Juan, of course, came on to direct, and then he goes on to serve as the franchise's shepherd and EP for the rest of the cinematic universe.

And Lorraine Warren herself served as a consultant on that film.

Very important.

So Chad and Carrie really leaned into the Warrens' religiosity, specifically their Christianity.

And though The Conjuring would end up getting an R rating, the studio brought on a marketing and PR firm geared towards Christian audiences called Grace Hill Media.

We have talked about them before.

Chris, I think you talked about them quite a bit in the Evan Almighty episode.

Was that right?

That's right.

Okay.

So the formula worked.

When the Conjuring premiered in the summer of 2013, it brought in a total worldwide gross of almost $140 million.

And money obviously means lots and lots of sequels.

So we got Annabelle, The Conjuring 2, Annabelle Creation, The Nun, The Nun 2, Annabelle Comes Home, The Curse of La Urona, The Conjuring, The Devil Made Me Do It.

And of course, the most recent entry, The Conjuring Last Rights.

Now, as we said, Last Rights is directed by Michael Chavez, who also helmed The Curse of La Urona, The Devil Made Me Do It, and The Nun 2.

And I think, I could be wrong about this.

I think all of the writers had previously written on conjuring franchise films, and they came from the world of the walking dead, I think, actually, before this.

I believe these writers wrote the lot wrote Devil on Devil, at least two of them on Devil Maybe Do It.

I think two of them did and I think the other one wrote on the Conjuring 2 maybe.

Yes, or at least had a story credit on it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But Chris, we get something else at the end of this movie, which I think is important.

And that is when they finally show real life photos of Ed and Lorraine Warren.

So I would like to spend the rest of this episode talking about the real people behind the Conjuring franchise and the decisions that they made in this franchise, and particularly in this final film.

So, can we please talk about what these people actually looked like versus Patrick Wilson and Vera Farnega?

Yes, but that's a little.

So, this is the thing I have the least problem with.

And by the way,

and I find these movies wildly entertaining.

So, I want to, I think this is actually great.

We can separate the discussion.

The first brief part of this discussion, Lizzie, we can focus on the

irresponsible act that these movies commit is effective reputation laundering.

We'll

get, yes,

it's more than that, I would say.

Sure, sure.

They're also wildly entertaining, and we'll talk more to just the movie and

leaving aside that element.

Yeah, I mean, look, if you were to cast Ryan Gosling to play me, that is

not as extreme as what we was done in this movie.

And that's pretty extreme.

No one would ever.

The blind man would feel my face and go, oh, no, you're not Ryan Goss.

No, no, no.

Yeah.

So, yes, it's a big departure, but they're movie stars.

It's just, it's very funny.

I get that.

And listen, honestly, Vera Farmiga, not that big a stretch.

Obviously, she's very beautiful, but like, that's standard.

I just mean in terms of an essence, you look at Ed Warren and it's like you're looking at the toad of Toad Hall.

And no, I don't feel bad about saying that.

And you're going to find out why in just a few minutes versus Patrick Wilson is absolutely beautiful, continues to be one of the most beautiful men on screen.

I love him.

I will say, Patrick Wilson, where is the painting in his attic?

Because that man is not a.

He looks exactly the same.

He looks the same as little children.

I don't understand.

Does he eat little children?

What's he doing?

What's going on?

Wanted to make a note.

He won the James Marsden Best Looking Guy from Your Hometown Award

in this film.

Although, and also former franchise winners, Ron Livingston included in in that.

Ron Livingston.

But Ben Hardy, could he, I think he's too pretty, but maybe he could win it when he gets older.

Unclear.

Maybe.

Yeah, there's a softness to him.

Okay, so Chris,

do you remember what the most famous Warren case is?

I believe it's the Amityville case.

Is that right?

You betcha.

It is Amityville horror.

So they very lightly tee it up.

At the end of the first conjuring film, they say, you know, we have, there's someone calling from Long Island.

um yeah and

which which by the way would not work with me you don't say there's somebody calling from ambityville it's the dad he's got an axe and then i'd go oh oh i know so you're not going to get me with uh long island too too deep a cut yeah deep a cut there you go well there's someone calling from long island and it's the ambityville horror case but it appears the most briefly in the conjuring two and that is the only time that they touch on it in this entire franchise so i want to ask you why do you think it is that the most famous case that the Warrens were ever involved in has basically not been explored within this cinematic universe?

I think they're one obvious answer.

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