Little life in 'Insidious: Chapter 2'

Where do you go after you’ve visited a shadow dimension where the dead hang out? That’s the conundrum faced in “Insidious: Chapter 2,” which comes upon a few quirky solutions and movie-ripoff scares before settling into a kind of coma.

Director James Wan (“The Conjuring”) is a brand name in horror, and to his credit adds a gloss on several riffs from “The Shining,” “The Exorcist” and even the unsupernatural “Psycho.” But “Insidious 2” eventually becomes only about what’s frightening in those earlier movies — and relegates its own scares to screechy jump cuts and pop-out-of-the-dark jolts.

Patrick Wilson is again Josh Lambert, the husband and father whose trip into another realm to retrieve his son’s spirit marked the conclusion to 2010’s “Insidious.”

Josh and his son Dalton have the ability to “astral project” into a place between life and death. It’s filled with otherworldly spirits, including a ghoul who wants a healthy body to live in. In the previous film, the fiend was a frightening old woman; here we learn she’s, well, something else.

The reasons for the switch are seen, too. But first Josh’s wife Renai (Rose Byrne, in a thankless role) has to suss out where the new bumps and creaks in the house are coming from. She also wonders what’s making Josh act so strange and why their infant baby seems to be a target for evil poltergeist.

Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell build a convoluted mousetrap, and occasionally it works. One big reveal in the third act is a time-trippy, house-of-mirrors moment that stands as the only real payoff in the film. The rest of the time, “Insidious 2” bumps into narrative walls.

The introduction of a new villain is a blatant attempt at a Freddy Krueger-style franchise fiend. A pair of goofy ghostbusters (Angus Sampson, Andrew Astor) return from the first film to lighten the mood, but get in the way. There’s also the reprise of the irritating Lin Shaye as a minor medium, along with a few other characters. There’s a loophole, apparently, to who must stay and who can wander back to the living.

As for the living, if any moviegoers end up wandering out of the theater during the dull, derivative parts of “Insidious 2,” they won’t miss much.

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