"Sinister is a frightening new thriller from the producer of the
Paranormal Activity films and the writer-director of The Exorcism of
Emily Rose. Ethan Hawke plays a true crime novelist who discovers a box
of mysterious, disturbing home movies that plunge his family into a
nightmarish experience of supernatural horror." - (C) Summit
OBS! THIS REVIEW MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!
So last night my boyfriend texts me, saying we're gonna watch Sinister when I get home from work. Great, I thought, having waited for it for a couple of months now, despite not having read or knowing anything about it. Sometimes you just have that weird feeling that a movie's gonna be really good. And it was. Damn it was.
Ethan Hawke does the convincing and committed role of Ellison Oswalt, a true crime writer who's famous for his debut book Kentucky Blood, in which his reporting exposed some cracks in the local police department's murder investigation techniques. And as a result, cops don't like him very much.
With the idea for his new book, Ellisson knowingly moves his family (his wife Tracy, his 12-year old son Trevor and younger daughter Ashley) into a new house in Long Island, where the previous family was hung from a tree in the backyard. All but one. Their youngest daughter, Stephanie, is still missing. With the purpose of solving the murders and find the missing girl, Ellison sets up his ordinary office with a cardboard box wall of clues and evidence and starts the hunt for material for his new bestseller.
Stumbling upon a box of homemade Super-8 reels in the attic, each labeled with a disturbing title (BBQ '79, Pool Party '86, Sleepy Time '98), Ellison rigs up his home movie theater, pours himself a whiskey on the rocks and starts watching. Each of the 'snuff' footage shows a gruesome set up of a family being simultaneously murdered in sickening ways, suggesting that the murder Ellison is currently researching is the work of a serial killer whose work dates back to the 1960's.
Once the filmstrips have begun rolling the movie itself suddenly takes on a dark tone. After reviewing the films over and over, Ellison discovers a special mark and a demonic face that turns up on each of the footage. With the help of the Sheriff's deputy and a local occult professor, Ellison starts to piece together a gruesome murder puzzle. A puzzle which effects the entire family. Ellison's son starts having his night terrors again, his daughter Ashley starts painting images taken from the 8mm films on her bedroom walls and Ellison himself leaves his wife on the verge of a nervous breakdown watching him fall into pieces due to his obsession battling his paranoia.
Sinister skillfully uses fragments of the supernatural to underline its investigation of the human mind and foibles of paranoia and insecurity, and does so with originality and a few genuine scares that will make you wet your pants. Apart from the few jump-and-scare tactics (desynced in video/audio which gives them a nano second's head start to your brain), it builds and broods atmospherically on the evil and hostility that mankind is capable of. When the demonic face from the filmstrips is identified as not only Mr. Boogie, but as the pagan Babylonian deity Bagul - he is inevitably invited to continue his work, resulting in the final film, House Painting '12.
On a personal note, this has been the atmospherically creepy and frightening movie I've seen in years. Adding to the scare is the fact the while we were watching the movie with all the lights in our house off, the globe lamp that's placed on one of the taller stereo speakers next to the TV suddenly lit on its own. An hour later when we were in bed (I'd already fallen asleep and J was laying next to me, watching Netflix on his computer) a flashlight on our dresser at the other end of the room suddenly turned itself on.
Yeah, I did it. Last night I went as Team Sceptic-but-still-hooked and saw the conclusion to the Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn Part 2. It wasn't as dull as I'd expected (due to the twisted end), but it wasn't as upmarket aspiring as I'd hoped the finale would be, either. At times it was cute. Mostly it was the same naïve, antagonizing cuddling and fiddling as it has been for the last couple of years.
I know, for a 'true horror fan' the Twilight Saga is an abomination with its salad chopping, interior designing, forest hiking, teenage stalking, suprisingly slow moving, 'tofu vegetarian', sparkling vampires. It does take the humanization of vampires to an extreme when discarding the general traits of the aristocratic fiend among high society that used to identify a vampire. And it does also (as I've stated in a previous entry) set the female role back to the late 50's, as it has been doing for the last four movies. And even in this last installement Isabella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is never given enough space to reclaim her role as a strong and independent vampire female. What I liked most about the novel were the parts where she exercised her ability to project her mental shield and use it externally to weild against her enemies. Although playing with the thought of Bella having her way with flat-faced hubby Edward (Robert Pattinson) any time she wants, all Bella's traits as a vampire (the strength, the hightened senses, the ferocity, the hunger, the untamed traits of a newborn) seem diminshed as she lives in the shadow of her husband's thought of her finally being an 'equal'. Or should I say the obedient wife? All this gender and race (human/vampire/wolf) comparison both irritates and sets me off. Why does this keeping on happening? Why would a female writer deliberately make her female characters inferior, as they seem less worthy than their male mates?
And Breaking Dawn Part 2 does become very doozy and cotton candy-like with the post-honeymoon cuddling and post-transformative, weirdly enough, boring sex. All talk and no action, so to speak. The movie uses the same blue-grey production design that was also used in the previous as well as the first movie, which becomes a bit mundane after having stared at it for more than an hour. The wolves are still the same digital disaster as in the prequels and the newborn half-human, half-vampire Renesmee (what absurd name is that?) is also digitalized in her infancy. The same effects that make the fighting scene(s) a bit tacky and way too PG to actually make a good supernatural fight. One clever switch is pulled as the movie nears its end and this movie screen twist is probably the only innovative surprise from its original novel. The rest was a mediocre ending to a mediocre story.
To read more on my opinions on The Twilight Saga, check out this previous post from 2010.
"An agoraphobic father teams up with a renegade priest to save his
daughter from the clutches of a gang of twisted feral children who
committed an act of violence against his family years earlier" - IMDB
OBS! THIS REVIEW MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!
Supposedly inspired by a violent mugging experienced by Irish writer and director Ciarán Foy, Citadel brings you to dilapidated council flats and crumbling social highrises in a dirty British suburb, a dystopia called Edenstown. The dingy surroundings and the bleak exteriors themselves make you cringe, and after the gruesome opening where Tommy Cowley's wife is silently attacked by a gang of hooded children that stab a syringe in her highly pregnant belly - you're left with a nauseating sub-textual message.
As a result of his wife's death (after being comatose for nine months) Tommy, played by Aneurin Barnard, is left with their nine month old daughter and a severe agoraphobia. Despite his intense therapy sessions, Tommy spends most of his days hiding out indoors in his new housing, cowering reduced to a gaunt wide-eyed emotional wreck. One night there's a banging on the door.
Convinced that the hooded gang is out to kidnap his daughter Tommy finds refuge in Marie, a sympathetic nurse that helped care for his wife during her comatose. Marie patiently explains to Tommy that his fear and paranoia are all in his head. “It’s so easy to demonize these kids. What they need is our sympathy." Well, what you got Marie, is blunt force trauma to the head.
In a last desperate search for an escape Tommy turns to the local vigilante priest, played by James Cosmo, who convinces Tommy that the children aren't the result of a greater malaise - they're plainly a disease unto themselves and must therefor be extinct. And you're dying to know; are these unloved children from broken homes or creatures far more sinister than that? Together with the priest, and his blind son, Tommy sets out on a final battle to save his daughter. And his sanity.
Citadel effectively rides on its initial tension through out the movie. The story balances between the feral reality of suburban brutality with poor economics and shattered homes, and the fragile mind of a young man who just lost his wife and is battling Social Services. For the main character Tommy, it's a parable of urban anxiety and the fear of fatherhood. For the viewer, it's an uneasy blend of horror of the psychological (the agoraphobia, the paranoia, the insomnia) and the supernatural kind; are those hooded child ruffians actually freakishly skinny zombies?
