Movie Reviews: "Sinister 2" Trope After Trope After Trope

The main character of Sinister 2 is named Ex-Deputy So and So. I don't know why, and neither does Google. To speculate: it could be a Man With No Name sort of thing, but no, So and So is such a bumbling beta that he could not possibly deserve a mysterious moniker. Another explanation is that it's a tongue-in-cheek genre reference, but that would only make sense if it had a sense of humor, which it does not.

The other explanation is that the filmmakers just didn't feel like naming him. This is of course ridiculous (the reality is that it's an inside joke from the first film, that apparently not a single reviewer remembered), but the movie is lackadaisical enough that it seems like it could be true. Sinister 2 is the most half-assed, secondhand attempt at horror I've ever seen.

In the first fifteen minutes, the following tropes appear, and are replicated again and again throughout like a YouTube video on repeat.

- A wise priest

- Pale dead ghost kid

- Something's in the closet

- Another pale dead ghost kid

- Old rickety 8mm footage of something horrifying

- Hallucinations of blood seeping on from the floor

- A demon that looks like a professional wrestler with bad makeup and/or Michael Jackson

I remember none of Sinister 1 except that there was a demon named Bagul, who is back for this film. Bagul is almost equally lazy a name as Ex-Deputy So-and-So. Couldn't it at least have been something Old Testament creepy like "Ba-Ghuuhl"?

Opposing Bagul is Deputy So-and-So (James Ransone), a lovable holdover from the first film, and Single Mother X (Shannon Sossamon). For some reason they've given her a name, which is Courtney. Courtney is running away from Alpha-Male Ex Y Dylan (Robert Sloan). All three drive beautifully maintained Ford trucks. 

They converge on a creepy ranch with a creepy old Church on the property. Single Mother X has two kids, one of whom immediately becomes haunted by Bagul. Part of being haunted by Bagul is that you have to get together with the other haunted kids (kind of like his little team of X-Men) and watch scary old movies of people being slaughtered in very creative and interesting ways. One family is hung above a river and eaten by alligators. Another is electrocuted on a flooded kitchen floor. The videos are played, inexplicably, alongside old timey records of terrifying sounds and music, the whole thing equating to a sort of murder video mashup. The movie is like a playlist of YouTube death videos. The evil is so banal and pointless it makes you question why anyone sane person would want to watch it at all.

The domestic struggle plays out how you'd expect (the beta wins using his brain and goodness), as the does the ghoul situation (the beta wins using his brain and goodness). 

The one semi-interesting idea is that Bagul's power manifests itself through art. The evil must be recorded in some way in order to be passed down. In this sense, the film is a reference to it's own Xeroxedness. It thinks video recordings of people being murdered is art. 

But copies of things aren't art. The videos and sound recordings of actual murders the film thinks are art are not. It is true that all art copies a little bit, but if it copies too much it stops being art.

Our brains are wired to tune out repeat noises. It's called auditory selective attention. That's why, when you're in an airplane, you block out the drone of the engine and focus on other noises. We don't block out a noise because it's bad. We block it out because it's repetitive. We want to hear something different. We want something else.

Check out our other review this week: American Ultra: A Hero for the Viral Age