★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
Sinister 2 sees
young mother Courtney (Shannyn Sossamon) and her two young sons – on the run
from an abusive husband/father – move into an abandoned house out in the
sticks, only to find that their place of refuge has previously seen life as the
stage of brutal killings, connected in some mysterious way to the murders of
the previous film. Returning character Deputy So & So (no, really, that’s
his actual name, check IMDB if you don’t believe me) tracks the paranormal
happenings to Courtney’s new abode as her sons fall under the influence of a
sinister presence.
Well, that’s what the movie’s supposedly about, but in
essence it’s 90 minutes of writer Scott Derrickson and co. turning to camera
and saying ‘Kids are creepy, am I right guys!?’ That’s really all there is to
it. There’s no sophistication or intelligence or even anything particularly
scary, which some of you may have noticed is a problem with something marketed
as ‘horror’. There’s a moment very early on in which the two boys are chasing
each other through a supermarket when one turns to find the other is gone. His
twin leaps up and frightens him, and that is the core of what Sinister 2 labels as scary. I am now so
numb to the cattle-prod effect of a jump-scare that it’s more like being
prodded awake than shocked out of my skin.
The characters of the film are also badly handled: the
abusive husband is a laughable caricature, the two boys are Children of the Corn knock-offs, and
whilst the mother and the deputy (who resembles Bruce Campbell just enough to
make me wish I was watching Evil Dead
instead) get some attempt at development, that’s not what the audience wants.
The children and the ghostly apparitions that come to them in the night should
be the ones we’re taught to care about and be frightened of, but the former are
lazily written and the scariest feature of the latter is that the director gave
their performance a thumbs-up!
But surely a well-constructed narrative could provide something for the film to hang from,
right? Well, yes…if such a thing existed in the same universe as this film. I
often complain about heavy exposition in genre flicks, but Sinister 2 actively withholds
important information for no good reason. Then when it feels kinds enough
to thrown the audience a bone, said fragments designed to explain the logic and
motivations of the hauntings are compressed into a five-minute sequence with a
paranormal investigator who fiddles with a scary radio before disappearing forever.
There is at least some light at the end of the long,
dimly-lit tunnel once you realise that as uninspired and dull as Sinister 2 is, it doesn’t set out to be
actively offensive and – with any luck – will be forgotten in seconds. And hey,
at least it wasn’t found-footage!
