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Sinister 2 has a few ingredients that will be familiar to fans of the original; unfortunately, in this slapdash second installment, none of them are scary anymore.Read critic reviews
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Hiding from her abusive, estranged husband, Courtney Collins lives in a rural house with her 9-year-old twins, Dylan and Zach. Young Dylan receives nightly visits from ghoulish kids who show him disturbing images of families being slaughtered. It's all part of the grand plan of Bughuul, the evil spirit who recruits innocent children to murder their loved ones. The only hope for his intended new victims may be a former deputy who's familiar with Bughuul's fiendish work from the past.
Rating:R (Language|Bloody and Disturbing Images|Strong Violence)
A disappointing sequel, Sinister 2 lacks the intensity and suspense that made the original so compelling. After the death of the Oswalt family a former deputy turned private investigator attempts to break Bughuul's cycle by burning down the houses of its victims to prevent him from cultivating new ones, but when he discovers a mother (played by Shannyn Sossamon) and her two sons living at a farmhouse that was one of the crime scenes he tries to find a way to save them before Bughuul can get to them. The film makes the classic mistake of over-explaining by showing how children are corrupted and turned by Bughuul (which is better left ambiguous). Also, the child actors aren't that good, and the casting of twins (who are similar looking) as the two brothers makes things especially confusing and hard to follow. Additionally, the retconning of Bughuul to having multiple killing cycles somehow takes away his mystic and diminishes the stakes of the battle for this one family. Sinister 2 makes all the wrong moves and becomes just another cheesy horror sequel doing the same old thing.
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Feb 12, 2016
Here's the thing with the first Sinister, a movie that I actually enjoyed, everything was going really well. The film was effective and the footage of the families being murdered while creepy music played in the background being the highlights of the film. The problems came in the fact that the twist, if it can be called that, was that it was actually a supernatural being/demon that was forcing the kids to commit these murders, before they then disappeared, theoretically to be consumed by this demon. That ruined a really good movie, to me. I suppose the idea of children murdering their entire families in horrifying fashion has to be creepy, but it just didn't work for me in the slightest. Everything in the first film seemed to be working in the real world and that is infinitely more creepy than any supernatural being they could come up with. So this brings us to the sequel, which picks up where things left off despite not featuring any of the characters from the original film, with the obvious exception of the Deputy, who's now the lead. Let us just say that the bloom is off the rose with this franchise. Hell, the bloom was off the rose by the end of the first movie. But, since that movie was massively successful considering it had a $3 million budget, this is what we get. A sequel that nobody really asked for. A sequel that, realistically, is inferior in pretty much every way, shape or form. There's no other way to put it. This movie had a bigger budget than the original, around $10 million, yet it somehow feels and looks cheaper than the original. I don't even know how that happens, but it did. The murder footage with the creepy music is back and, while it is the best part of the film, it just feels like regurgitating what came before without actually really trying to expand too much on what was done prior. Though, to be fair, what exactly CAN you do to expand on the first film. They didn't really leave much room for growth or expansion. I'm not saying that C. Robert Cargill or Scott Derrickson, who co-wrote the film, didn't try their hardest to make this film into a good one, but I'm just saying that perhaps, subconsciously, their hearts weren't as into this as it was for the first Sinister. Maybe they conceived that as a one-and-done movie and not necessarily the start of a franchise. But you can just tell from watching the movie that there's no real life to the film, it's just words and actions on the screen. There's no real meaning or reasoning to any of them. It exists just because it can, or because it was commissioned. The film has poorly written characters, acting is so-so (Shannyn Sossamon pretty much hammed it up in some scenes) and the film is littered with jump scares, which, again, and I say this a lot, is the laziest form of scaring people humanly possible. Anyone can pull of a jump scare, but not a lot of people can actually pull off terrifying people down to their core. You know the sad thing is the fact that, while this film was less commercially successful than the original, it still made more than five times its budget. You know what that means, right? Another fucking sequel. It hasn't been confirmed or even hinted at, I think, but it wouldn't surprise me if we get one. The problem lies in the fact that there's no real intrigue in the premise anymore. That intrigue was thrown away in the first film, when you find out what's really going on. And they failed to get it back with the story they presented here. Not that I imagine that they were even trying to achieve that, but the film just isn't interesting to watch. It's not awful, but it's terrible in that there's just nothing to really justify this film's existence, everything is exactly the same at the end as it was in the beginning. So, essentially, everything that happened in this movie is moot point, because the demon will keep doing what he's doing. Which is what pisses me off about these 'it's not really over' endings, it's like nothing matters. No matter what anyone does, it's gonna keep going on, so why the fuck do we keep making these goddamn sequels then? This isn't the guiltiest of parties when it comes to this type of shit, but it's the straw that broke the camel's back. I can't recommend this movie, it's seriously one of the most uninspired sequels I have ever seen. Real bad movie here.
A qualitative improvement over its predecessor, the sporadically bone-trembling Sinister 2 won't proselytize anyone who loathed the original but it's a step forward. At this point, Blumhouse Productions has a monopoly on horror films in a calendar year. It doesn't replicate the formula of the original as much as it elaborates on it. Now the paradigm shift is from the clueless parents to the actual brainwashed victims of Bughuul- the homicidal children. It's ghastly to witness the Pied Piper seduction of an innocent youth being indoctrinated by other child poltergeists into goosestepping with the boogeyman's bidding. It preys on our fear of our offspring the same Stephen King attempted in Children of the Corn. The found-footage reels of the aforementioned murders are the integral components and they're the most inventively nerve-rattling ingredients as well. An inverted alligator decapitation and a scarecrow-burning-in-effigy death are the prime cuts. Normally people don't flee the premises of a ghost infestation for absurd reasons but finally, the impetus for Courtney Collins (Shannyn Sossamon) is a flight-risk court order which seems more legitimate. James Ransone is the only reprising cast member and thankfully he is no longer a Deputy Dewey-esque officer. I'd say the best output for Blumhouse this perennial is The Gift but Sinister 2 doesn't assassinate their reputation.
Okay, another sequel to an original that I didn't see. Something tells me that the first one wasn't much better. This is slightly creepy but ultimately it rolls out as any number of predictable horrors do. Another forgettable effort.
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