Could have been so much more

Rating: 5/10 (22 September 2013)

Sinister - the highly anticipated and lauded follow-up by Scott Derrickson to the very scary Emily Rose exorcism movie - is a bit of a letdown. The visual images are great, the monster is spooky in an old-school way, and the old movies are very freakily effective. But I found myself counting down the minutes to Ellison Oswald (Ethan Hawke)'s death. The characters simply didn't have enough meat to make the narrative terribly interesting. Deputy So-and-So was a humorous aspect of the film but that felt like it under weighed the film being a serious scary movie. The humor for me disjointed the actual parts of the film designed to scare you. Hawke's line, "OK Dog, you just stay there, because I'm going to...bash your head in" when he sees a monstrous spirit in the form of a canine kills the tension. The concept of a demonic deity named Bagul is silly enough so the film should have had a more serious execution. But because of the tongue-in-cheek approach I was more bored or waiting for something really creepy to happen than actually being scared. When the scares did happen, everything else framed around them was so un-involving that while I jumped, I was more surprised than disturbed. The ending has elements of a classic horror film (blood soaked walls, creepy kids, the whole schnozzle) but what sucks is this film could have really been as scary as everyone said it was, but sadly wasn't. Still worth a watch if you're an Ethan Hawke fan and enjoyed Scott's really disturbing exorcism movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which I highly recommend.