Harefooted Halloween: Sinister 1 & 2

It’s too hard to talk about these without spoiling everything all over the place, sorry.

What I Liked: Unlike the Insidiouses and many other ghost/haunting movies these do seem to have some rules and structure to them.  The first film looks at how the demon possession goes down from the adult/parent perspective and the second takes it from the child’s point of view.  To be clear though these are two separate cases and not the same possession from two different standpoints.

The angle of the children being the killers is kinda neat.  This idea is not at all unprecedented as evidenced by The Omen, Children of the Corn, Firestarter, Village of the Damned (here’s my review of John Carpenter’s 1995 version if you’re curious) and others, but it’s certainly a weird way to go.  Usually how you get away with this is to have the kid be taken over by some sort of supernatural or alien presence.  That way you can say the child isn’t just pure evil and killing everyone for no reason.  The Sinisters follow suit with a demon that’s really behind all of the deaths.  A killer kid isn’t something I’d wanna see too often but I’m glad the filmmakers went for the dicey twist.

What I Didn’t Like: Using the old super 8 films to show us the grisly murders of the families in the first one was fine because Ethan Hawke (The Newton Boys) discovers the canisters and projector in the attic of his new house.  So it’s a mystery where they came from and how they got there.  In 2 the super 8 camera and films become too central to the point where you have a small child running around trying to film with this giant clunky device while attempting to kill people.  It just looks stupid.

You have families being murdered in diverse and painfully gruesome ways in the snuff films so these border on torture porn.  The reason they don’t completely fall into that category is because the victims aren’t actually tortured.  They’re executed straight up without gore and even very little blood.  Ok, the one where the killer places a live rat on people’s stomachs and covers it with a bucket and then adds a hot coal on top to force the rat to chew through the abdomen to escape is definitely pretty torture-y.  In fact it was totally used as a torture method in 2 Fast 2 Furious twelve years earlier.

The malevolent demon is called Bughuul (pronounced ba-ghool).  That’s too damn silly sounding.

Dumbass jump scares.

Overall Impressions: Not the worst set of demon possession movies I’ve come across but they’re not that good either.  They’re surprisingly tolerable even though they follow the typical ghost picture spinning your wheels formula of hearing creaky sounds and seeing visions of dead people and/or demons with a snail’s pace progression of story development.

I think I liked 2 better because they changed it up by showing what the kid goes through during the possession process.  He has to deal with peer pressure from dead children and I felt for the little bastard.  Also I liked that they didn’t up and change the rules on you to fit whatever terrible storyline they wanted.  They stuck to what they laid out in the original and changed the point of view to keep things fresh.  That’s a good idea.  But you kinda need to see the first one to understand the sequel.

These aren’t must sees but if you’re into ghost stories you’ll probably like them.  If you aren’t don’t worry about it, there’s better stuff out there.