Enter The Bhuguuliverse Part 2: Sinister Bhuguulaloo
Last time on blog, we thoroughly dissected Sinister. Now it’s time to look at the sequel, Sinister II.
The 2010s was a decade when snappily-titled horror franchises were all the rage. You had your Conjurings, your Insidiouses, and of course your Paranormal Activities. Cheap to make compared to the big-budget superhero fare, studios could slap a new installment in cinemas every Halloween with little risk. So why did the budding Sinister franchise stop with the second entry?
Probably because it sucks prodigiously.
(Spoilers for Sinister)
Taking place several years after the first movie, Sinister II stars the unnamed comic-relief deputy from the first movie. Having put together The Bughuul’s murder pattern too late to save Ellison Oswalt and his family, he’s now travelling around the country burning down murder houses before anyone can move into them in an effort to short-circuit the curse.
Things take an unexpected turn when he discovers that his next target has recently been occupied by a young mother and her two sons, in hiding from an abusive husband who’s hell-bent on getting them back by any means. And one of the boys is already in the grip of The Bughuul, a process that we get to see from the inside this time.
Anyone making a sequel to Sinister was in a tough spot, because the first movie was basically a murder mystery masquerading as a horror movie. Who was behind the killings wasn’t really important; the whole story was leading up to the revelation of how he was doing it. Once that mystery has been solved, where do you go from there? You can’t make a sequel from the parents’ perspective again.
The direction Sinister II chooses--tell the story from the perspective of the kid being Baghuulified--is good on paper, and in better hands it could have produced something interesting. In reality, what we get is something that feels like an adaptation of a C-tier Stephen King novel.
The ingredients are all there: the villain who talks, the saccharine melodrama, the over the top gore. The movie pulls back the curtain on The Baghuul’s indoctrination process, and the results are both thuddingly un-scary and kind of confusing.
My assumption, at the end of the first movie, is that The Baghuul is just possessing/mind-controlling the kids into killing their parents. According to Sinister II this isn’t the case, and in fact the kids are plagued by bad dreams which only go away when they agree to watch the previous victims’ murder films, and after they’ve seen all of them they...decide to kill their family?
I’m honestly not sure, because the story is kind of confusing. The Baghuul’s squad of ghost kids spends most of the movie trying to get the timid non-violent brother to watch the murder tapes, then at the last minute they reveal that actually it was the other, violent brother who they were targeting all along, and when the violent kid watches the tapes he’s like “yeah I’ll set my brother, mother and father on fire and join your ghost club, that seems like a cool thing to do.”
I guess the idea is that the ghost squad kids were stirring up the latent rivalry between the two brothers to the point where the violent brother would be down for some familial massacre, but that doesn’t make sense for two reasons. Firstly, even with that explanation in place he still goes from “rebellious and takes a little too much after his abusive father but otherwise normal” to “wants to murder his entire family to please a creepy ghost man” way too quickly. It feels like there’s half an hour of movie showing his descent into murder that got cut out, which speaks to the overall rushed and over-stuffed nature of the movie.
Secondly, the girl from the first movie didn’t seem to have any even semi-rational motive for killing her family. Apart from one incident where she gets in trouble with her parents, she’s completely normal up until the moment she decapitates everyone with an axe and then literally paints the walls with their blood. If you really, really stretch it then you could interpret her last statement as indicating that she was motivated by a desire to make her father famous again, but that’s such an insane line of reasoning that in the movie it comes across as confirmation that she is indeed being influenced by The Baghuul and isn’t acting of her own volition.
Even apart from these nit-picks, the decision to focus more on the ghost kids is executed in the least-creative way possible. The ghosts appear in full light, often with cheesy transparency effects, and they talk. You all know how I feel about horror villains who talk. At least The Baghuul doesn’t talk, although he does do the pop-out-of-the-frame thing that worked so well the last time. (Other highlights include The Baghuul trolling the Deputy by messing with his computer, and a teeny-tiny Baghuul appearing in a small photograph).
The stylistic gap between this and the first movie can be illustrated with a box. In the first movie, the super 8 camera and film are in a simple cardboard box. It’s creepy and under-stated. In this movie, they’re in a special, ornate Baghuul chest with a velvet lining. It’s over the top and stupid.
The climax of the movie takes place in a corn field where the evil kid had made a clearing which is--I swear I’m not making this up--in the shape of The Baghuul’s face. Seriously.
Even the super 8 films, the highlight of the first movie, are way less effective this time around. Partially this is due to an over-reliance on gore and violence compared to the relatively subtle treatment of the first movie, partly because a lot of the deaths feel like goofy Saw traps (one kid dangled his family over a swamp so alligators would chomp them) instead of the semi-realistic murder methods we saw before. Incidentally, this just solidifies my previous contention that there’s no way the Baghuul murders wouldn’t be infamous.
Oh, and then there’s the music. I assumed that the strange music that plays over the super 8 films in the first movie wasn’t supposed to be diagetic, but in fact it turns out that it is, blaring over the murders via an old-timey gramophone record player. It’s very hard to take seriously.
Things get even worse when the movie focuses on the Deputy. There’s no non-mean way to say this, but the guy playing him just cannot act to save his life, reacting to everything that happens with cartoonish gurning. This was fine when he was a semi-comedic side character, but here he’s the main character, getting into a romantic relationship with an abused women, and it just doesn’t work on any level.
I get the feeling that Sinister II was made with the idea of a third movie in mind. That would explain the odd and completely pointless digression about numbers stations and creepy radio broadcasts that the movie goes into, and which comes back at the end in an apparent sequel hook. I took a quick look at the Wikipedia page to see why that never happened (the dire critical reception can’t have helped) and discovered this absolutely incredible piece of information:
Prior to the release of Insidious: The Last Key, Jason Blum stated that a crossover film between Sinister and the Insidious series had previously been in development, tentatively entitled Insinister, and that he personally believed it had potential for re-entering it, stating that "we're going to cross our worlds at some point".
Jason Blum, I hereby promise that if you make a movie called Insinister, I will see it ten times in the cinemas.