' INSIDIOUS : OUT OF THE FURTHER ' : FILM FRANCHISE SNIPPET

CINEMASCOPE : Further On The Money Train. Insidious : Out of the Further adds a few new wrinkles to the long-running horror series, but even the most inventive ideas cannot disguise a franchise running out of ideas - or scares.

Insidious : Out of the Further, the sixth entry in the series, gives a fairly industry-standard answer : longer than they probably should.

While Insidious has long stopped being ' insidious,' to its credit, the film does what a sequel this deep into a franchise often always does.

It leaves the Lambert family - the franchise's main protagonists - behind and introduces a new set of victims, Gemma [ Amelia Eve ], a dental hygienist and single mother, lives with her young daughter Maya [ Island Sustin ] is the same house where her troubled mother committed suicide years earlier.

Despite the suicide, normalcy continues and her everyday tasks hardly change - like taking out the trash - but there's something different : strange old neighbours with malevolent smiles begin walking the streets.

Soon, Gemma starts slipping involuntarily into the Further - the other wordly realm of demons and ghosts - and she discovers that her unusual ability allows her not merely to enter this spirit world but also to bring things back from it!

That is a decent new wrinkle to the regular mythology. However, Insidious has now reached the stage where even new wrinkles hardly feel celebratory.

The problem is not that the film is terrible - it is okay, though without the scares - it's that it is familiar to the point of exhaustion.

Here the new villain is Cyrus [ Sam Spruell ], a dead cult leader who wants to exploit Gemma's ability to cross between worlds.

There are new rules, new apparitions and a few new pieces of nightmare imagery. Still, the scares remain fairly mechanical, with one or two exceptions.

A dentist sequence is suitably unpleasant [ and somewhat yucky ], while a surreal sequence involving Gemma navigating an ever expanding fortress made from sofa cushions is easily the film's most inventive set piece .......... until the heads of dead people [ mostly actors with bad makeup smiling ] pop out from the sides.

!WOW! thanks Mohammad Kamran Jawaid.