There have been some less-than-subpar spinoffs and sequels in the incredibly unnecessary “Conjuring” series, recently including “The Nun” and “The Curse of La Llorona,” which were both pretty terrible.

The “Annabelle” films haven’t fared much better up to this point, so it would be understandable if non-fans and regular theater-goers were more than a bit reluctant to shell out money for a ticket of “Annabelle Comes Home.” But if you find the significant other wanting to see it or your friends wanting to get together for a creepy popcorn flick for the summer before “It: Chapter Two” gets here, you could do far worse.

The third “Annabelle” entry is actually moderately entertaining, with a few genuinely creepy moments and a chilling atmosphere, though it’s littered with several cheap jump-scares. It also effectively re-creates the decade of the 1970s in nearly every frame, giving it a definite retro horror feel at times.

Picking up right up after demonologists Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) and Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) acquire the Annabelle doll and lock it away in their room of cursed items, “Annabelle 3” takes off as they go on vacation and leave their daughter Judy (Mckenna Grace) in the hands of her friendly do-gooder babysitter, Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman). Daniela (Katie Sarife), an uninvited friend of Mary Ellen’s ends up snooping around and, out of almost nothing but sheer, unadulterated stupidity, opens up the glass case with Annabelle in it.

Luckily, what follows isn’t a typical demonic possession film. In fact, “Annabelle Comes Home” is a satisfying haunted house/monster fest. As the haunted doll proceeds to call forth every single spirit and creepy-crawly that has a connection with different items in the Warrens’ forbidden room, the movie unfolds like a drive-in horror flick, setting up some very fun and creative things that go bump in the night.

That’s not to say everything works. A sort of werewolf bit comes off as comically bad, and the film’s final scares are a bit of a letdown as the climax ends very simply and abruptly. I was left wondering, “Is this actually ending already?”

Here comes the biggest problem, which might ruin the movie if it weren’t stupid to the point of being entertaining. Performance-wise, almost everyone does solid work. Grace should have plenty of work ahead of her, and the chemistry between Farmiga and Wilson is as good as ever as the Warrens, even though they don’t have much more than 10 minutes of screen time. But while Sarife does just OK playing Mary Ellen’s persistent and mischievous friend Daniela, her acting is at least better than the writing of her character.

Daniela may be one of the dumbest characters in horror movie history — but without the terrible writing of her character alone, there would be no “Annabelle 3.” She is the trope-ridden lightning rod of bad decision-making as she tries to break into the Warrens’ forbidden room of creepy stuff, which she fully believes to be haunted, to attempt to contact her dead father. She then somehow thinks it’s a good idea to unlock a glass case with “Positively DO NOT OPEN” on it to adjust the sitting position of the doll inside.

So, Daniela wholeheartedly believes there is a world of spirits and afterlife, wants to talk to a dead parent she misses, and decides the toom that’s chock full of malevolent items is the best place to do it. It’s not like she’s trying to summon a demon here or do anything malicious, but she actually reads the histories and case files of some of these items and still thinks it’s safe to mess with them. So either she’s incredibly negligent or she has the IQ of a hamster.

Still, “Annabelle Comes Home” is an OK way to spend a summer afternoon without anything else to do, even if a few details shoot torpedoes at it. And while I wouldn’t lump it in with the renaissance the horror genre is undergoing, its retro atmosphere, haunted house-style set pieces and creatures, and just enough campiness make it enjoyable.

On a side note, the movie is rated R for “horror violence and terror,” but I was very surprised at this. I genuinely thought the movie was PG-13 until I looked it up afterward. I recall only one F-bomb and some very light instances of blood. Nothing in the film, in my opinion, came close to the PG-rated 1982 version of “Poltergeist.” So if your young teenagers are dying to see it, there’s no reason not to buy them a ticket and make it easy on everyone.

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“Annabelle Comes Home” is currently playing at the Riverside Cinemas, 1017 S. Boone St. in Aberdeen.

George Haerle holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing for media and lives in Cosmopolis.

Vera Farmiga stars in “Annabelle Comes Home.”