Sinister 2 (2015)

Haiku Review:

Sinister sequel

Deeply boring, deeply dull

Please: no Part Three. Please

I loved the original SINISTER. It was almost my number one film of 2012. Quite why it’s taken so long for a sequel to come along is anyone’s guess, and if anyone said ‘because the film-makers were too embarrassed’ they’d probably be right.

SINISTER 2 I did not like.

At all.

It’s difficult to know where to begin with how terrible this film is. Long, interminable dialogue sequences that bear little service to the plot, punctuated every now and then with shot on 16mm archival death sequences. The way these have been shoehorned into a frankly uninteresting storyline merely emphasises how awful and mechanical this whole endeavour is. A male lead who should be relegated to supporting actor status forever, and a female lead so bland she just shouldn’t be allowed on screen again. And neither should the work of her costume designer, who has designed her a set of outfits to wear that range all the way from baggy to frumpy with every shade of bland in between, just to match her character. The photography is blurry and muddy, perhaps to make you wonder which bits are 16mm flashbacks and which aren’t, but somehow I don’t think that was the intention.

To be fair there were quite a few plot points in SINISTER that were, for want of a better term, total bollocks. But by the time the film got there it had done such a good job of being terrifying that nobody was especially bothered. Here we start with the idea that a child has to be shown the death-record film clips by other ghost children because the demon-thing is either too busy perfecting his Slipknot-look, or perhaps can’t even be bothered to do the scary stuff in his own film.

Are the 16mm bits scary? Not really, partly because they obey the law of the sequel in having to be more excessive than the first film. There’s a good jump scare with an alligator but on the whole they’re just ludicrous, with one massive pinch from the Pan Book of Horror Stories (and George Fielding Eliot) to top it all off.

I haven’t mentioned the plot in any detail because the mere thought of trying to recall it has me threatening to nod off. SINISTER 2 is not just disappointing, it is truly terrible. In fact if someone held a gun to my head and made me choose I would rather watch PIXELS again than this.

SINISTER 2 is on general release from today. 

And is even worse than PIXELS