Also caught Sinister 2, the sequel to a decent spook house flick from a few years back that starred Ethan Hawke. The main takeaway I had from this sequel is that you really needed to see the first one for much of it to make sense… yet it’s barely a sequel to that movie at the same time. The movie isn’t going to spend much time explaining the nature of its supernatural spooks yet it also pretty much ignore the events of the previous movie too.

You see, unlike a lot of movies of this type, this doesn’t lay out the groundwork for the various characters. There’s no move into the spooky haunted house scene, the characters are already living there and one of the boys is already having late night conversations with spooky ghost children (who are inordinately fond of reel-to-reel films). The mother of these children is revealed, over time, to be in hiding from her well-connected abusive husband… but we don’t get the typical setup scene of them together or fleeing the home. Nope, just drop them into the movie and go.

I can’t decide if this is good/confident screenwriting or bad. It’s atypical screenwriting for this kind of low budget PG13 horror flick which tends to go for all the usual tricks. So I kind of dig the movie for that… and I dig how casual it sometimes seems about the two boys and their encounters with the weird but kind of friendly (but evil) ghost children. And the main bad guy spook (Baghool?) is kind of hangin’ out too, occasionally effing with people just, I guess, because it’s a thing to do.

I can’t say this is a scary movie but I just kind of found it interesting and fascinating, perhaps despite itself. By the end, I was kind of into whether or not the supernatural tricksiness of the ghost kids (and their boss demon) would work out and some of the spook show stuff was amusing but I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be.

Which is pretty much feeling about the whole movie. Did they intentionally create a weird family drama with ghosts or did they accidentally make one while intending to make the usual low-rent, low ambition spook fest? I don’t know… but I give the movie credit for kind of befuddling me.

Score: 72