Lifetime Presents: Evil Dead, Jr.
James Ransone is one of the few reasons to watch Sinister 2. He's also a symptom of its myriad problems. The actor had a minor role in 2012's Sinister, a refreshingly adult spin on horror's creepy-kid and found-footage sub-genres. Here, he takes center stage in a film that has fooled itself into thinking it needs to exist, beyond making a few quick bucks.
The first time out, true-crime author Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) sought help from a goofy cop nicknamed "Deputy So & So" (Ransone) to deal with strange goings-on inside his family's new home. In the sequel, Oswalt is long dead, and his confidante has been kicked off the force. Ex-Deputy So & So now spends his day as a part-time private eye and a full-time hunter of the child-snatching demon Bughuul (Nicholas King). While preparing to burn down a haunted farmhouse, he discovers that a single mother (Shannyn Sossamon) and her two young boys (real-life brothers Robert Daniel and Dartanian Sloan) have secretly moved in to escape from an abusive husband/father (Lea Coco).
Writers Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill have built an elaborate and darkly beautiful domino scheme, but they forgot to check all the angles--resulting in unfortunate collisions that render their whole setup pointless. Sinister 2 touches on the very real horrors of domestic violence, just as the first film made Oswalt's struggles with insignificance even more compelling than Bughuul's army of demented ghost kids. Instead of focusing on Sossamon, though, we're left with the comedic foil from Part One, reimagined as a well-intentioned but ill-equipped hero. Shining the spotlight on Ex-Deputy So & So's aw-shucks demeanor and scared-of-his-shadow pratfalls only draws attention to the fact that Ransone looks like Christian Bale riffing on Bruce Campbell's Ash character from Evil Dead 2.
Honestly, I didn't mind this distraction, but the dichotomy contributes heavily to Sinister 2's tonal schizophrenia. There are four movies competing for ninety minutes of our attention. Individually, three of them might be worthwhile. Forcibly packaged as a whole, they're oil and water:
The first of these films is a classic domestic-abuse thriller, wherein an abusive-jerk husband tries to intimidate his estranged wife into reconciliation. We get the requisite flashbacks to hitting incidents, a pants-wetting episode, and a couple of truly menacing appearances from Dear Old Dad to remind us of the stakes. Take out the supernatural element, and Sinister 2 is Firstborn, or any Lifetime-esque movie of the last thirty years.
The second film is a riff on Evil Dead 2, with a hapless, handsome dude shakily staring down the forces of darkness. Ransone performs admirably here, but jumping between comedic reactions to darkened-hallway terrors and a sincere romance with Sossamon (not to mention a straight-up dramatic encounter with her character's ex) makes for unsure footing to say the least. Ransone is an expressive actor, and a sympathetic one, as is Jim Carrey--but I wouldn't want to see Ace Ventura: Pet Detective ruined by a heartfelt monologue about bullying.
Third, we have a very Stephen King subplot about the young brothers' relationship with Bughuul's legion of ghost children. Led by the authoritative and charismatic Milo (Lucas Jade Zumann), the gang must convince one of the siblings to watch a series of twisted home movies depicting grisly murders. This will complete a spell, compelling them to kill their own family and become eternal servants of the dark overlord (and resulting in another film to be discovered by an unlucky clan). The writers capture peer pressure quite well, and Sinister 2's young actors are uniformly great; Milo is a creepy, underhanded little bastard who could easily assume the Tracy Flick role in a gender-swapped remake of Election. A nickel's worth of free advice, though: don't think too hard about the King connection, or else you'll see a lot of Children of the Corn in these characters and events.
The fourth movie is a hollow franchise picture aimed at audiences who don't care about story--the same crowd who zoned out during Saw in between the "brutal" death trap sequences. Sinister 2 continues the motif of home-movie homicides laid out in the first picture, with rapidly diminishing returns. The order of events is the same: family enjoys themselves while being secretly filmed; family drinks spiked Kool-Aid at dinner; family wakes up bound, gagged, and stuck in an awful situation; family dies horribly. The first film made the audience work for their chills, combining degraded film-stock with weird perspectives and brilliant hand-to-mouth editing techniques. Here, we just wait for the ghoulishness at the end of a predictable cycle. One family awakens immersed in water and tied to electrical wires; another wakes up strapped into dentists' chairs; and on and on. We know the drill is coming because we know the drill.
I'm not sure how much blame to place on director Ciarán Foy, the writers, or Blumhouse Productions, whose trademark low-budget/big-returns operation has become a disappointing McScare-formula factory. Sinister 2 looks polished, where the first film looked unearthed. All the frights are telegraphed and paid off with soundtrack bombast. And the downright bleak and hugely satisfying ending of Part One has been replaced with a direct-to-video jump scare containing as much dramatic tension as it does logic.
Which brings me full-circle back to Ransone. Had Deputy So & So remained a series footnote, had Cargill and Derrickson stuck to their Ghost Story for Adults guns, and had the franchise stamp been applied with a lighter touch (or not at all), the film might have stood a chance. That's a mouthful of caveats, I know, but the whole thing feels like a series of half-measures and concessions. As a huge fan of the original, I felt as deceived and betrayed as one of Bughuul's damned, sullen children--forced to watch the same wholly avoidable sins repeat themselves forever and ever and ever.