Released: August 21st,
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.
