The Conjuring 2
To my great delight, I thought this movie was just as good as the first. The children in the movie behave like real kids. They aren't angels or monsters, just kids trying to make sense of things within their scope of experience. There's some scary shit happening, and it doesn't make sense. Did using the spirit board open a gateway? Was the house already haunted when they moved in?
In some ways, I preferred this one to the first installment. For one thing, the demographic, 2 girls and 2 boys, mirrored my time with my stepsiblings when we were teens. My younger biological brother preferred to keep to himself. I like the way the siblings are portrayed as close, but realistically so. The recent upheaval of their family seems to have drawn them together, which helped them get through the events of the movie. Everyone in the movie is beautifully flawed and very real.
The movie has some great visuals and auditory effects. It doesn't rely heavily on CGI or expensive effects, making it feel all the more real. The breadcrumbing of things to come had me eagerly looking forward to the next film in the series. Well done!
Sinister
This is a movie I had been meaning to watch for years but never got around to viewing until recently. It had a lot of promise. Ethan Hawke does an excellent job portraying a writer on the verge of losing his shit! Fred Thompson plays an excellent sheriff who doesn't want any of the drama. Then there's Vincent D'Onofrio, who may have been born to play the part of a professor of obscure shit.
There are some great visuals in this movie. The boy in the box was especially effective. The ghost children are creepy without being overdone. It's a good movie that feels like it had the potential to be great, but too much was left unexplored or underutilized.
I would have liked to see more of both the sheriff and the professor. The casting was just too perfect to not warrant more screen time. I especially would have liked to see more of Vincent D'Onofrio's professor exploring the background of the demon.
In the end, it was a good movie, and I don't regret having watched it. I even made a point to watch the sequel. However, I don't feel like I learned enough about the family to feel anything for them, which left the ending more of a shrug for me.
Sinister 2
I get the feeling that they learned a few things from the first movie and made improvements in the sequel. I definitely felt more of a connection to the characters in this one. Even the ghost children felt more fully realized, horrible little shits that they were.
I liked the way they expanded the mythos of the demon and its methods without losing the logical thread. They also didn't rely on jump scares. I hate jump scares because they feel like lazy cinematography. Give me a story that creeps me out for days, not a quick startle that's forgotten by the time my heart rate drops back to normal. (Bit of weird trivia: my normal resting heart rate is 95 - 105 but dropped into the 80s while I was watching horror movies. Nothing makes sense.)
I enjoyed seeing more of the deputy character. We rarely get to see what the aftermath of a horror movie event is for a secondary character, so this was refreshing. The addition of a mundane secondary villain was another interesting choice. We were given more of a backstory for the family in this movie. I appreciated that none of the characters were willfully stupid. My only real complaint was the lack of the professor and no real explanation. Maybe we need a third movie?
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