Annabelle Comes Home...Sort Of

I saw Annabelle Comes Home yesterday because I've seen all of the other Annabelle/Conjuring movies, so I wanted to see this one too. What a disappointment! First, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga were barely in the movie! It largely takes place while they're out of town. (I guess they had other projects going on.) You know who else was missing from the movie? Freaking Annabelle! That creepy doll was in the movie about as much as Patrick and Vera which is sad since the movie IS called Annabelle Comes Home. I expected creepy Annabelle to be in this movie much more than she was. Instead, we get Patrick and Vera's daughter, the babysitter, and assorted friends of the babysitter being terrorized by other random evil spirits. (Annabelle, apparently, was controlling things behind the scenes.) One thing I thought was funny in the movie was a scene from a TV show (the Dating Game or something) where you see a kid holding a large Raggedy Ann doll. The real Annabelle is a big Raggedy Ann doll and not the doll you see in the Annabelle/Conjuring movies. That was sort of an inside joke, I guess. At least I saw this one at the matinee and didn't pay much. I probably should have gone to see Toy Story 4 again.

During the many previews I saw, there was one movie that looked interesting called Them That Follow about religious snake handlers. I didn't realize religious snake handlers were a real thing until I went to South Carolina for two disastrous semesters of grad school and there was a discussion in one of my classes about them. I remembered seeing a movie in the 1970's about them, but I figured that was just Hollywood fiction. Not so! I also saw previews for the next installment of Stephen King's It and Doctor Sleep, neither of which intrigued me. (Stephen King must be making money hand over fist with all of these movie deals. Good for him.) I remember reading a quote from him talking about being raised by a single mother and he said something like, "She did the best she could with what she had." I feel the same way about my own late mother. What a great statement. It's really all any of us can do.