Malignant

James Wan's movies (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring) are not known for subtlety. In his horror-hackemup pictures, actors are walking, muttering bags of viscera, lurching from frame to frame, waiting to be gutted or bludgeoned. Everyone is fair game and the endless bloodletting is all in good fun.

For his latest film, Malignant, which he also co-wrote, Wan has cast a group of highly exchangeable, mostly unfamiliar faces, no doubt because a hairy, hateful demonic force in Seattle is laying waste to all who have crossed him, which means the audience shouldn't get attached to anyone.

Young Madison Mitchell (Annabelle Wallis), a tour guide to underground Seattle (who knew?) sees the killings as they are happening because she has a mysterious connection to the fiend, the explanation of which is the thread that drives the story.

Madison is aided in her quest to greater or lesser degree by her sister Sydney (Maddie Hasson) and two Seattle police officers, the handsome and gutsy Detective Kekoa Shaw (George Young) and his older and short-tempered partner Detective Regina Moss (Michole Briana White). To say the big reveal is hair-raising is too bad of a pun to be avoided.

Wan's Malignant is riddled with plot holes and implausibilities that are outlandish even for a horror flick but, darn it, the picture still manages to be audaciously entertaining.