10 Horror Movie Characters That Single-Handedly Ruined Recent Movies
9. Dalton Lambert - Insidious: The Red Door
The most recent Insidious film proved beyond any doubt that the franchise has nothing new to say and is basically running on empty - no matter that it still scared up a storm at the box office.
The Red Door is a depressingly low-energy family drama that occasionally remembers it's a horror film.
With the story being so intently focused on the father-son relationship between Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) and Dalton (Ty Simpkins), Dalton's withdrawn, snooze-inducing screen presence is the primary reason this thing is so damn forgettable.
No offense to Ty Simpkins, a talented young actor, but Dalton in this film is such a joyless bore that even his somewhat irritating roommate Chris (Sinclair Daniel) is a welcome presence by comparison, because at least she brings a bit of life to the movie.
IndieWire's David Ehrlich perhaps put it best when he hilariously said in his review, "Simpkins plays Dalton as a non-character so vacant it's hard to tell if he's haunted or lobotomised."
The audience was certainly compelled to care about Dalton in the series' previous films, yet here he's so devoid of anything that - as the apparent emotional lynchpin of the story - he basically ends up ruining it completely.