By Bob Garver<\/p>\n
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\u201cSinister 2\u201d is a dreadful movie, as was the 2012 original. The premise is that a demon called Bughuul gets very young children to murder their families and then turns them into ghosts to haunt new families. The killings are preserved in old movies which are watched throughout the films, thus providing them with much of their requisite violent content, until the end when the new family is in danger.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This time the family is one torn apart by domestic violence. Courtney Collins (Shannyn Sossamon) is fleeing with her sons Zach (Dartanian Sloan) and Dylan (Robert David Sloan) from her abusive ex-husband Clint (Lea Coco). They hide out in abandoned parsonage next to a church where a certain set of murders were carried out many years ago. They\u2019re found by a Bughuul-chasing ex-deputy with no name (James Ransome), who doesn\u2019t know exactly what to do since Bughuul makes it a point never to commit any murders until the family moves away from the actual haunted house. But he needs to do something because the army of ghost children are showing their movies to Tyler, trying to turn him into the next murderer. Zach, by the way, isn\u2019t happy about this. He hates that his brother is being chosen for anything, even something horrible, over him.<\/p>\n
For what it\u2019s worth, I do like the rule where the families have to move out of the haunted house before they get slaughtered. So often in these haunted house movies, the audience spends half the running time yelling \u201cGet out of the house, idiots!\u201d This otherwise uncreative franchise is at least one step ahead of that logic.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll pay the movie another compliment, and it\u2019s one where a lot of people (especially critics, from what I\u2019ve read) will disagree with me. I think Bughuul himself looks absolutely terrifying. Most people focus on the fact that he has a fleshy patch where his mouth should be, and I do agree that it looks silly. But it\u2019s his eyes, or rather his triangular eye holes minus the eyes, that are the stuff of nightmares. This is a good thing because Bughuul is otherwise a pretty ineffective villain. I think it\u2019s only been once in the whole franchise he\u2019s made physical contact with anyone, he mostly just exists to pop into the frame and scare the daylights out of the audience. He gets children to do all the killing and his army of ghost children to convince them to do the killing (probably a smart move actually, as the children are more likely to listen to fellow children than his freaky, no-mouthed self).<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s with the killings where we run into trouble. I hate that these movies have to rely on exploitative violence to get attention. These scenes always have to involve some unnecessarily complicated methods (that it seems the child murderers wouldn\u2019t be physically able to put together) so the movie can take pride in their variety. And the thing is that they\u2019re not even that gruesome. They\u2019re gruesome concepts, sure, but they never seem to play as quite as disgusting as the filmmakers want. As a matter of fact, I wonder if the filmmakers threw some forced profanity into the script so this movie could get an R rating because they couldn\u2019t get it with violence.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s only one way a movie like \u201cSinister 2\u201d is any fun and that\u2019s if you can see it with a big crowd full of skittish people who are going to jump out of their seats every time something pops up onscreen. This movie opened at #3 at the weekend box office and is going to fall fast, so you have maybe one more week to take advantage. But really, this is an unpleasant movie that will put you in a bad mood and has nothing to offer but some cheap jump scares.<\/p>\n
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One and a Half Stars out of Five.<\/p>\n
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\u201cSinister 2\u201d is rated R for strong violence, bloody and disturbing images, and language. Its running time is 97 minutes.<\/p>\n
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