Sinister 2

Released:  August 21^st, 2015

Rated:  R

Distributor:  Focus Features

Starring:  James Ransone, Shannyn Sossamon, Robert Daniel Sloan, Dartanian Sloan

Directed by:  Ciarán Foy

Written by:  Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill

Personal Bias Alert:  haven’t seen Sinister, was the only person at my screening

1.5 of 10

            What do you do when a film makes $77 million on a $3 million budget?  Make a crappy sequel, of course!  The only surprise here is that it took three years for Blumhouse Productions to release Sinister 2 after churning out the second Purge movie in only a year and all three Insidious chapters in just four.  Small budget franchises are the studio’s bread and butter, and while you can’t fault them for their profitability, you can take them to task for their quality.  Even so, Blumhouse films normally have a respectable amount of trashy scares and cheap tricks, which makes Sinister 2’s utter ineptness all the more disappointing.

            As with its predecessor, Sinister 2 follows a twisted version of the boogeyman as he lures a child into his violent clutches.  This time he targets a mother and two sons who’re hiding from an abusive husband.  They’ve taken refuge in an abandoned home that is, of course, the location of a previous boogeyman murder, which draws the deputy from the first film in to investigate.  The mother and deputy’s lives mix, the jerk dad starts coming back around, yadda yadda yadda.  The plot of this film is clear from the beginning, made all the more clunky by exposition-filled dialogue that sputters from the actors’ mouths with all the realism of a poorly sewn mermaid baby.  The first film is allegedly rather surprising, and while this one does have one decent twist, everything else in it is so trite that any thrill that might’ve come from this lone offering is suffocated by the surrounding fog of stupidity.

Oh, and that’s not even the most remarkable failure this film has to offer.  What’s more surprising is its inability to build any sort of tension.  Not only is it entirely lacking in the sort of overarching story tension that propels a film to its climax, but also in the momentary tension you should feel before a jump scare.  Director Ciarán Foy has ruined the complaint that jump scares are easy music builds and camera holds, because he flubs them so often in Sinister 2 that you start to question if he was even trying for them at all.  But if these false starts were intentional, then you’re left wondering what the hell was supposed to be scary in the first two-thirds of this film.  The wooden ghost kids?  The unimaginative snuff films?  The god-awful framing?  To be honest, the film’s failures were the only things that had me cringing, particularly throughout a scene where two characters sit on a swing set and their faces are constantly obscured by the chains on the swings.  Perhaps this is just a failed stylistic choice, you ask?  There’s also the scene in the kitchen where the mother is in the exact middle of the frame, blatantly breaking the rule of thirds and making the composition annoyingly unbalanced.  None of these off-kilter shots do anything to build a sense of unease and seem to only be examples of awful filmmaking basics in an equally terrible film.

By the time Sinister 2 drags into its climax, you’ll be begging for these characters to get sliced and diced just so you get something for your money.  It’s another disappointment, though, as the antique-style camera footage (a tension-sucking gimmick the film insists on using) and lack of thought is more apt to leave you laughing than jumping.  Given how stupid the characters are, how vague the boogeyman’s is, and how little actually happens in the final scenes, it’s questionable whether writers Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill were really trying at all.  A more lame, slap-dash conclusion (and entire film) is difficult to find.  You won’t leave the theater happy after seeing Sinister 2.  Do yourself a favor.  Don’t buy the tickets in the first place.

Other Notes

Ø  I laughed out loud when they showed what previously happened in the house.

Ø  At one point a kid pees his pants out of fear, and it looks like a faucet was running from the bottom of his pants leg.  How did a stream of water supposedly make it all the way down his jeans without being absorbed by the fabric?

Ø  This film is rated R, which means they didn’t pull off a single moment of horror when they had however much gore, language, and crazy images at their disposal as they could imagine.  Everyone involved should be ashamed.