America's Creepiest Home Videos

Rating: 6/10 (8 January 2017)

"Sinister" has been waiting in my watch queue for quite a while now, but for a variety of reasons I always postponed my viewing. On one hand I had really high hopes that the film would be worthwhile, since I read several praising reviews from people, or in magazines and on websites, that I usually find very reliable and with tastes similar to mine. But on the other hand this still is a primarily mainstream film that almost purely exists of clichés and tries a little too desperately to obtain a passable rating R. So what's the final verdict? "Sinister" honestly is one of the better and scarier horror films of the last 10 to 15 years, but that's almost solely thanks to the genuinely disturbing and nightmarish super-8 home movies that are integrally shown throughout the movie. As stated already, the plot as well as the setting and the character drawings are derivative and clichéd. Ellison Oswalt is a true-crime writer, but it's been more than a decade since he scored the huge bestseller hit "Kentucky Blood". In his exaggeratedly fanatic search to surpass that success, he moves with his family into a house where – unbeknown to his wife and children – a horrible and still unsolved tragedy took place. So far, it's all routine and familiar stuff The local sheriff tries to chase them away, Oswalt's marriage is under a lot of pressure because of his professional stress and drinking problem and his children suffer from nightmares in their new surroundings. But then our writer stumbles upon a box full of uncanny old-fashioned super-8 home videos in the attic and THEY undeniably form the eminence of "Sinister". Every self-respecting horror fanatic will consider these videos little masterpieces in their own right: shocking, morbid, raw and yet impossible to turn away from. The videos depict the gruesome murder of the family in whose house Oswalt is now living with his family, but also the sick murders of several other once happy families all over the United States. By the time that Oswalt discovers the truth of who (or what) is behind these vile massacres and who filmed them, the fate of his own family is already sealed Ethan Hawke does a terrific and mature job carrying the film, Scott Derrickson's direction is more than competent and the ice cold & spooky soundtrack contributes a lot to the tension and atmosphere as well. But still, like I assume every horror fan with me, I personally just kept looking forward to the each showing of the next super-8 video and didn't care all that much about the supernatural explanation connecting them. These little short films ought to be released separately on DVD, as far as I'm concerned, as every single one of them is a parental nightmare captured on film. Loving family scenes degenerate into harrowing killings, now that is horror! IF only the script didn't revert to ancient mythologies to provide clarification and IF only the producers would have had the guts to make the murders explicit and brutal instead of suggestive, well than "Sinister" would have been the greatest genre hit of the new millennium. If only