Sinister was a nifty little movie, not really that memorable, but it was freaky in its own way and did a serviceable job scaring the audience with its version of the Boogeyman and his nefarious scheme to coax children into not only killing their entire families, but filming it also so that they could lure another child into his demonic clutches down the road. As I said, not that memorable, but it was original and not that bad of a film.
Sinister 2 pretty much craps all over the first movie and then tosses it a used oil rag to clean up with. This movie is not only terrible, but it commits to being a new kind of terrible for which there are no words. Where Sinister was dreary and dark, with a mysterious figure always in the background, Sinister 2 cans the Boogeyman taking a back seat to his undead army of demon children as they tempt twin boys into darkness.
They do this by talking to them.
Not possessing them, not using psychology or manipulation… just talking to them and using plain old peer pressure.
The twin boys… they don’t seem that bothered that there are demonic ghost children in the house and treat them like they’re just some neighborhood kids who came over to watch movies in the basement. Let me repeat that again: These boys know these kids are demonic ghost children and don’t care.
Meanwhile, the boy’s mom is in a battle against her abusive husband who is trying to force her and the boys to live with him again because he’s so one-dimensional that he apparently takes great joy from hitting them. I know, there are probably some jerks out there who are like that, but this guy is so badly written that he’s only a few bright colors away from being a cartoon character.
There’s also a love story, I think… it’s a little hard to remember. Chemistry like that hasn’t been seen on screen since Anakin and Padme.
I’ll give this movie the little credit that it deserves in that it’s not a complete rehash of the first movie and does at least try to do something different with the sequel, but the thing it does do just stinks on every level. It’s boring, there’s nothing scary about it, it substitutes cheap jumps scares for actual fright, and the story of the ghost children trying to get the boys to watch snuff films doesn’t work. The paranormal angle is just too… common in the movie. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. No one should be this calm about a group of demonic ghost children in the basement.
Spoilers in this paragraph. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The end of the movie features the greatest conundrum of the entire film as a ten year old kid manages to not only create a skull-shaped clearing in the middle of a cornfield, but also manages to incapacitate his entire family, tie them to crosses, and place them in the ground. These aren’t tiny crosses either… they’re easily ten feet tall. Keep in mind, one of these people is the kid’s 200+ pound abusive father.
My question is, how? How the heck did he do this alone?
The movie didn’t seem to know either, because it left that part out. The family is just suddenly there in the middle of the cornfield and the kid doesn’t even look like he broke a sweat, expending almost as little effort as the writers did crafting this excuse of a movie.
Jason Gaston 