Oh man, what a giant pile of shit this movie was – in the best way possible.
I admit, despite considering myself a Horror Fan™ for years now, I never really had a phase where I watched the kinds of movies James Wan makes. I happened to see The Conjuring in theaters when it came out because I was going with other people and it just happened to be something that was playing, but I don't remember anything about it. I've never seen a Saw or Insidious movie or any of the other Conjuring movies. But I'm going to have to echo the sentiments of the RedLetterMedia guys and say that after this movie, I'm paying attention to what James Wan makes next.
A lot of my opinions on this are going to be similar to the RLM review, frankly, so if you've already seen that you can probably just skip reading this. I wouldn't have watched it in the first place if I hadn't seen the review, but from the very first scene which felt like something out of an Evil Dead movie I knew I was in for a fun ride. The entire premise of the movie, really, is the horror equivalent of Quentin Tarantino's whole shtick: Take some ideas from exploitation movies and elevate them into really slick movies with budgets. Except in this case James Wan kind of ripped off the plot of Frank Henenlotter's movie Basket Case. Speaking of Evil Dead, it also reminded me a bit of Drag Me To Hell, except in that Sam Raimi still winked at the audience from time to time making it comedic and having intentionally bad special effects. With Malignant, that never really comes through, which makes it all the better.
I don't have much more to say. It's a hilarious and fun movie. The last act of the movie when the main character gets put in a jail cell is fucking amazing and I honestly couldn't believe what I was watching. Strongly recommend.