Children, Have You Ever Met The Boogeyman Before?

Year: 2015

Director: Ciarán Foy

Cast: James Ransone, Shannyn Sossamon, Robert Daniel Sloan

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I had reasonably high hopes for Sinister 2. The first one was somewhat of a leaden affair with a twist that assumed we either slept through most of the first half and/or had a subhuman IQ, but the trailer at least made its sequel look like a tighter flick with less expository baggage. And that’s why they should hire trailer editors to actually edit the movies, because that’s the exact opposite of what happened.

And once again my horror movie optimism is battered mercilessly. My inner Pollyanna is on life support.

Sinister 2 isn’t so much a continuation of the first film as a direct assault on its established mythology. Ex-Deputy So-And-So (James Ransone), the film’s only returning character, is now a private detective who, in his spare time, is finding properties that have been haunted by the evil child-corrupting demon Bughuul and burning them down. As he approaches a supposedly abandoned house in Illinois, he learns it is being inhabited by Courtney Collins (Shannyn Sossamon) and her twin sons Dylan (Robert Sloan) and Zach (Dartanian Sloan), who are on the run from an abusive father.

Of course, Bughuul has targeted the kids, despite his established MO actually placing him somewhere near California, according to Sinister. The spirits of his captured children are hard at work corrupting the boys by showing them nasty home video footage of them murdering their families, supposedly flipping the script and displaying Sinister’s plotline from the child’s perspective rather than the parent’s, even though it really doesn’t make much sense at all. The kids are led by Milo (Lucas Zumann), who looks like the preppy dude from The Purge if he was a decade younger.

And skipped a couple acing lessons.

I think the biggest tragedy of Sinister 2 is that it actually could have been a pretty great film. All the ingredients are there: a dysfunctional family, an eerie parallel for abuse, rival twins with split devotions, and a possible treatise on how holding a camera can separate us from moral culpability, à la Nightcrawler. The sculpture is hiding in that chunk of marble, but someone down the line forgot to pack the chisel, leaving them to make do with a handy sledgehammer.

In the Blumhouse canon, Sinister 2 is Thor: The Dark World. Following a rote original that didn’t really bring anything new to the table, it’s a sequel that looks and acts like all of the other movies, yet to an astonishing degree is pretty thoroughly an unmitigated failure. Now, Marvel’s lows are considerably higher than Blumhouse’s, so let’s not get carried away with that comparison, but it needs to be said that Sinister 2 is pointless to the degree that it actually compromises the meager quality of the original.

Which, as you may recall, isn’t even a movie I enjoyed as much as freaking Unfriended.

Everything good about the original is twisted into an unrecognizable shape and the malformed lumps that marred it are now diamond hard kidney stones squeezing through the urethra of your mind. Exhibit A: The genuinely bone-chilling murder tapes have been perverted into a dull slog of deaths that are well-rendered, but either too ordinary to be memorable (freezing to death) or so ludicrously outré it feels like Baz Luhrmann guest directed them (an alligator leaps from a swamp to devour a hanging family). Gone is the uncanny, haunting imagery. In its place is workmanlike efficiency and a genuine confusion about how the first movie actually functioned.

And that was something I actually liked. Don’t even get me started on how the original’s dumbass predictable twist is actually repeated as though it were a new revelation instead of something that has been patently obvious since the trailer back in 2012. Or how the shoddy, disjointed climax is now just a catwalk of annoying horror tropes that aren’t even necessarily from Sinister’s subgenre. Or how… You know what? If I don’t stop here, I may never stop.

Step one is admitting you have a problem with Sinister 2.

Sinister 2 isn’t the worst horror movie ever made (as if anything could ever beat Zombie Diaries 2: World of the Dead), but it’s just such a programmatic slog that it ceases to be scary in any way, shape, or form. Of course, it’s mainly asking us to be spooked by fully lit children with ash smeared on their faces and a demonic symbol dripping Flash-animated Goosebumps blood on a laptop (apparently the ancient demon Bughuul has been taking computer classes), so there’s that. 

But even the famous Blumhouse jump scares are telegraphed entire reels ahead of time, require characters to perform sublimely idiotic acts in order to manifest, and just generally reek of pallid flop sweat. Plus a bunch of kids make the “shh” motion approximately 900,000 times because it’ll look cool in the trailer, and not out of any actual need to be quiet. One little girl ghost actually does it twice in thirty seconds to a kid who hasn’t discernibly moved. It’s about as exciting as a tall glass of Tab.

The one saving grace of Sinister 2 is James Ransone, who gracefully makes the transition from wisecracking comic relief to bedraggled hero. His character scenes are genuinely funny, and his presence provides a real human anchor for the cardboard goings-on. In fact, none of the actors, especially Shannyn Sossamon, do a bad job. It’s just that their motivations are so murky they tend to flounder with their characters.

My advice would be to not even bother with the Sinister franchise. The first one is just barely good enough for a recommend, and if the series continues in the way it’s headed, it’s already well past its prime (which peaked somewhere in the series’ first three minutes). You’d be better off with the Insidious movies, even taking into account the second film’s general execrableness. Anything is preferable to this plodding, drab nonsense.

TL;DR; Sinister 2 is a dumb sequel that actively makes the mediocre original worse.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1023

Reviews In This Series

Sinister (Derrickson, 2012)
Sinister 2 (Foy, 2015)

Boogie Nights

Year: 2012

Director: Scott Derrickson

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Juliet Rylance, James Ransone

Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The horror genre is tough. Hollywood has always and will always follow trends to their breaking point, if my constant hackings through the foliage of the slasher genre have taught us anything. But the problem with this is that the market becomes so inundated with identical flicks (*cough cough Marvel*) that genuinely good movies get forgotten in the shuffle or lose their impact due to their similarity to previous releases.

Today's biggest craze in the horror genre is the paranormal/haunting movie, with the biggest examples being the Paranormal Activity franchise, The Conjuring and its bloodsucking hanger-on Annabelle, and Insidious with its bevy of sequels. 

Over time, sameness sets into any genre like a rot. But when you consider that three of these films are directed by James Wan and star Patrick Wilson, and that over half of them have been contributed by Blumhouse Productions (who have become the It name for trendy horror), it's reasonable that a project like Sinister, also released by Blumhouse two years following the success of Insidious, would get lost in the swells.

They even use the same chiropractor between shots!

For what it's worth, Sinister didn't try very hard to separate itself from the Insidious routine other than shifting the main focus in the besieged nuclear family from the mother to the father. Inspired! 

The plot goes as follows: true crime author Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) has moved into a new home with his wife (Juliet Rylance), daughter (Clare Foley), and son (Michael Hall D'Addario). What he hasn't told them is that the house is the site of his latest subject, a family who were hung from the tree in the backyard before the youngest daughter went missing. (Side Note: If you can't figure out the mid-film twist before Ellison does, you are either asleep or watching a different movie.)

In the attic he finds a set of tapes with innocuous-sounding names ("Family Barbecue," "Pool Party," etc.) that depict a series of grotesque family murders from across the country, including the crime scene from his very backyard ("Hanging Out"). It doesn't take long for him to discover a demon known as Bughuul (Nick King) - aka Mr. Boogie because every respectable demon needs a ridiculous name that the local children can call him - resides within the images and haunts him and his family as he attempts to discover the secret behind the mysterious tapes and finish his book, upon which his entire faltering career hinges.

Maybe he's just confused that there are films that exist that weren't directed by Richard Linklater.

Certainly Sinister's plot takes the road most traveled, but that is perhaps the least of its sins. Although the bulk of its scare sequences are cribbed from other paranormal flicks, the film is quite creepy very often, especially whenever Ellison watches a new murder tape, which are grainy, grisly, and by far the most genuinely disturbing original element of the entire film. But the problem is that the film amasses flaws like an Alicia Silverstone character at the mall with her dad's credit card.

As I implied earlier, the central mystery is far too easy to figure out (making it all the more frustrating when Ellison fails to grasp it), and the wife character is inconsistently written, unbelievably gullible, and far too pliable when it comes to letting her children sleep in the bedrooms of murdered children. Not to mention that the nightly scare scenes become repetitive and downright exhausting. 

Seriously, Bughuul's nightly schedule (turn on a film in some unsuspecting part of the house, wait for Ellison to hear the flapping of film that his family is mysteriously numb to, appear in the shadows, repeat) is more rigorous and reliable than the Long Beach bus timetable.

The ending is flabby and runs out of gas long before the supposedly climactic reveal, and a series of useless characters shuffle briefly into the second act, only to provide explanatory but patently useless information far too late for the film to do anything interesting with it. 

In short, Sinister is a film in desperate need of tightening up. At nearly two hours, the film is far too sprawling for its relatively lean story. I suppose it's kind of ironic, considering that the main character spends the bulk of his time editing film footage together. But that irony is easily lost on the viewer as they snooze through the final third of the film.

It's a real shame, because aside from its extensive collection of film-maiming deficiencies, Sinister is really a quite good chiller. Alongside a series of authentic frights and a wonderfully effective comic relief in the form of Ellison's helper, Deputy So & So (James Ransone), it builds an enthralling mythology for its demon that separates it from the pack with thematic and engaging material. But it squanders these ideas by shuttling Bughuul off on other business while we are forced to watch Hawke try his darndest to keep his constant flailings at a film projector entertaining.

All in all, Sinister is decent, but utterly unmemorable, just like director Scott Derrickson's intensely muddled follow-up Deliver Us From Evil. There are enough good elements to prevent it from being a total flop (and I'm genuinely excited for Sinister 2, which seems like it cut the fat considerably), but it's not worth checking out amid the noise and clamor of the thousands of other lookalikes populating the genre at the moment.

TL;DR: Sinister is decently scary, but too generic and sprawling to overcome its flaws.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 943
Reviews In This Series
Sinister (Derrickson, 2012)
Sinister 2 (Foy, 2015)