Review: Jessabelle 2014

This is another one that wasn’t well received, but of course, as usual, I totally loved it! I’ll admit it isn’t perfect, there are some “holes”, I suppose it could be considered a bit “campy”…But I really, really liked it! I thought it was engaging and creepy and the story fell together well enough (like I said, not perfect, but I don’t ask for perfection).
“Jessabelle” is set in a small town in Louisiana, and tells the story of a young girl, Jessie, who has been in a car accident. She is in a wheelchair, temporarily, and needs assistance, but she has no friends and no family, save for her estranged father. Her mother died of cancer when she was a baby, her father couldn’t raise her alone, so she was raised by an aunt, who also recently died. So, of course, she goes to stay with her father, in the house in which she was born, but not raised. Jessie is set up in her mother’s old room, which looks to have been untouched since she died, and she finds some videotapes with her name on them. Her mother made the videotapes for her while she was pregnant, knowing she wouldn’t be around for long after she was born. The videos start out happy, with a birthday message and a silly tarot card reading, but become increasingly unsettling as they start to warn Jessie of a presence in the house with her. Jessie also has some pretty bizarre and disturbing nightmares after moving into her family home. As the story unfolds we see that nothing is as it seems and there is a very big secret in this town.
I really did like this one, perhaps some would consider it “predictable”..? I certainly didn’t but I find that I rarely do. I’ll admit that, as with many movies, the ending sucked…really just that last 1 or 2 minutes, actually, as far as I’m concerned, but, as you know, I don’t hold a bad ending against the rest of a film, so I still loved “Jessabelle”!