Do you care? I think I couldn’t care less. Do you get the distinction? I actually think I do. She’s channeling the spirits around her, acting as a lightning rod for evil. “It was used as a conduit!” What this means is that Annabelle, even though she’s portrayed as a dark and dangerous devil doll, isn’t coming to life. No way! “The doll was never possessed,” a character declares. But the film’s annoyingly arcane premise demands that the audience understand that Annabelle is not, herself, possessed. If this movie had been made several decades ago, Annabelle would likely have been a female Chucky, a demon figurine wreaking violent havoc. In her bangs and red-bowed pigtails, with a sallow face marked by sunken but popping eyes, bloody scratches, and a ripe smile, she bears a marked resemblance to the ventriloquist dummy in the 1978 Anthony Hopkins psycho thriller “Magic.” That fixed grin of hers promises a great deal of mischief, and “Annabelle Comes Home,” in its almost completely haphazard and what-the-hell-let’s-go-to-hell way, delivers it. Annabelle is one of those creepy Victorian dolls that has been a staple of horror films for decades. There’s a comparable bit of pesky Talmudic niggling woven into the premise of the “Annabelle” films, of which “ Annabelle Comes Home” is the third, and maybe the most hyper and generic.

I learned my lesson, even though a stubborn part of me still thinks, “If it walks like a zombie, and talks like a zombie…” In a review of a horror movie, I once called a character a zombie who was not, technically, a zombie (he didn’t have the precise credentials to be classified as the living dead), and tons of readers called me out on it. In a country that should probably think about renaming itself the American Entertainment State, fan culture now produces an obsessive level of pop scholasticism, one that can parse the rules and details of movies and TV shows as if they were fine points of law.

Annabelle 2 review