Some other people’s home movies are never much fun; in the Sinister business, they’re downright deadly.
Both the Sinister (from 2012) and also the sequel feature old-school found-footage Super 8 reels wherever parents and children’s mundane domestic pursuits (swimming within a pool, opening Christmas presents, etc . ) lead to their own murders (electrocuted in water, buried in snow). It is as though someone sat through one too many family events and snapped.
Always lurking in the background is a supernatural bad guy with a gruesome sense of irony and a dubious understand of style: Bughuul looks like a cross between an undertaker, a death-metal drummer, and a homicidal clown. Just like your pet, the Sinister films, produced by low-budget horror hit-factory Blumhouse (Paranormal Activity, Insidious), are hodgepodges of genre tropes that occasionally cohere into something unsettlingly fun -- or at times in Sinister 2, just downright troubling.
In the first Sinister, policeman “Deputy So-and-So” (James Ransone, best-known as Ziggy Sobotka in The Wire) discovers which Bughuul (Nicholas Price) attacks the new inhabitants of houses where he has murdered before - but only once they move out. Here, he’s private investigator “Ex-Deputy So-and-So, ” who else spends his spare time burning down buildings where Bughuul has struck. Just as he turns up to a supposedly vacant house in rural Illinois with cans of gas, he bumps into Courtney (Wayward Pines’ Shannyn Sossamon), who’s hiding there from her abusive estranged spouse with their twin nine-year-old boys (siblings Robert and Dartanian Sloan). The P. I. sets out to help them fend off Bughuul - while convincing them not to leave.
There are limitless dark corners (even in broad daylight), a spook-filled basement with enough found footage to start a snuff-film archive, a paranormal expert to explain everything in five-syllable words, flashes of self-awareness, and of course, children who notice things their parents don’t. Bughuul has a habit associated with turning one child against the rest of the family. Will there be -- gasp! - an evil twin?
Director Ciarán Foy crafts a tense atmosphere with his hand-held cameras, and also the doe-eyed Ransone has a self-deprecating charm, but poor underwritten So-and-So spends most of his time wandering from one leap scene to the next, whether staring at his laptop (where Bughuul appears as if on break from an Insane Clown Posse video) or poking around those dark corners. Sossamyn is charismatic, and the Sloans have an engagingly feisty relationship. At its best, the film goes gothic, and crazy violence explodes from domestic tension.
But the enemy is not just us - it’s “them”: Bughuul is evidently a Babylonian god who persuades children to splurge atrocities against the rest of their (white, American) families, and also the opening scene is a Super 8 film of 3 hooded people trussed to crucifixes, one of whom is placed on fire to burn alive. Sinister 2 doesn’t a lot hold up a dark mirror to cultural fears; this reproduces what our real-life ISIS Bogeymen have done. Do not blame writer/creators Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill - the film was shot last summer, simply when the first of the execution videos were being released -- but found-footage horror has been co-opted. Maybe it’s time for you to find new ways to scare ourselves.
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Both the Sinister (from 2012) and also the sequel feature old-school found-footage Super 8 reels wherever parents and children’s mundane domestic pursuits (swimming within a pool, opening Christmas presents, etc . ) lead to their own murders (electrocuted in water, buried in snow). It is as though someone sat through one too many family events and snapped.
| A scene from "Sinister 2." |
Always lurking in the background is a supernatural bad guy with a gruesome sense of irony and a dubious understand of style: Bughuul looks like a cross between an undertaker, a death-metal drummer, and a homicidal clown. Just like your pet, the Sinister films, produced by low-budget horror hit-factory Blumhouse (Paranormal Activity, Insidious), are hodgepodges of genre tropes that occasionally cohere into something unsettlingly fun -- or at times in Sinister 2, just downright troubling.
In the first Sinister, policeman “Deputy So-and-So” (James Ransone, best-known as Ziggy Sobotka in The Wire) discovers which Bughuul (Nicholas Price) attacks the new inhabitants of houses where he has murdered before - but only once they move out. Here, he’s private investigator “Ex-Deputy So-and-So, ” who else spends his spare time burning down buildings where Bughuul has struck. Just as he turns up to a supposedly vacant house in rural Illinois with cans of gas, he bumps into Courtney (Wayward Pines’ Shannyn Sossamon), who’s hiding there from her abusive estranged spouse with their twin nine-year-old boys (siblings Robert and Dartanian Sloan). The P. I. sets out to help them fend off Bughuul - while convincing them not to leave.
There are limitless dark corners (even in broad daylight), a spook-filled basement with enough found footage to start a snuff-film archive, a paranormal expert to explain everything in five-syllable words, flashes of self-awareness, and of course, children who notice things their parents don’t. Bughuul has a habit associated with turning one child against the rest of the family. Will there be -- gasp! - an evil twin?
Director Ciarán Foy crafts a tense atmosphere with his hand-held cameras, and also the doe-eyed Ransone has a self-deprecating charm, but poor underwritten So-and-So spends most of his time wandering from one leap scene to the next, whether staring at his laptop (where Bughuul appears as if on break from an Insane Clown Posse video) or poking around those dark corners. Sossamyn is charismatic, and the Sloans have an engagingly feisty relationship. At its best, the film goes gothic, and crazy violence explodes from domestic tension.
But the enemy is not just us - it’s “them”: Bughuul is evidently a Babylonian god who persuades children to splurge atrocities against the rest of their (white, American) families, and also the opening scene is a Super 8 film of 3 hooded people trussed to crucifixes, one of whom is placed on fire to burn alive. Sinister 2 doesn’t a lot hold up a dark mirror to cultural fears; this reproduces what our real-life ISIS Bogeymen have done. Do not blame writer/creators Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill - the film was shot last summer, simply when the first of the execution videos were being released -- but found-footage horror has been co-opted. Maybe it’s time for you to find new ways to scare ourselves.
See more in the original post
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