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Sinister 2 | 2015 | R | - 2.8.5

Running from an abusive ex-husband (Lea Coco), a mother (Shannyn Sossamon) moves her 9-year-old twin boys to an old country farmhouse. Strange things occur in the house and the abandoned church next door, the ex-husband shows up to claim the twins, and an evil entity influences the children to murder while filming their actions as "kill art." Also with Nicholas King, James Ransone, Robert Daniel, Dartanian Sloan, Robert Daniel Sloan, Tate Ellington and John Beasley. Directed by Ciaran Foy. [1:37]

SEX/NUDITY 2 - A woman begins a relationship with a man and after drinking whiskey one night (please see the Substance Use category for more details), they kiss passionately in the kitchen, but stop (he is clothed and she wears a long opaque nightgown that reveals slight cleavage).
 A man tells another man that he is going to go have sex with his wife (using crude terms), and then tells the second man never to contact the wife and he says about his own wife, "Once you have a piece of something like that, it's hard to shake it off."
 A woman wears dresses that reveal slight cleavage.

VIOLENCE/GORE 8 - A man, a woman, and a boy, all hooded, hang on crucifixes in a cornfield at night with their wrists and ankles tied to the wood while we see (in silent footage) another young boy holding a sickle, as he lights rope fuses with a cigarette lighter and we see all three figures writhe and burn in tall flames; we see this sequence three more times in nightmares in which a different young boy holds the sickle and lighter and after each nightmare, the boy with the sickle in the three repeat dreams wakes up in his bed and gasps.
 A boy is seen sleeping in bed as an older boy (a ghost) appears beside the sleeping boy and wakes him up and this happens every night until the ghost forces the boy to watch five kill films in the basement; four other ghost children are seen and after the sleeping boy views all the films they become gray-skinned with large spider-web cracks on their faces that accompany boils and the kill films are grainy Super 8 footage of the ghost children killing their families; we see footage of a mom, dad and two children hung upside down from a tree limb over the bayou with bags over their heads as two alligators jump up and snap loudly onto the head and shoulders of the adults as they scream and the footage ends. Five people in an old church are seen lying on their backs on the floor with their heads pointing to the center, forming a pentagram and with their arms outstretched and large candles sit between the bodies and the bodies lie under white sheets; we see that the wrists are nailed with spikes to the floor, as are each pair of ankles (their shirts are lifted slightly to reveal bare abdomens and hoods cover their faces as a hand from off-screen puts a rat on each abdomen, a metal pot over the top of it and several hot coals on top of the pot; blood gushes and the rats crawl out of the sides of the bellies, spreading gushes of blood all over the floor. In footage of a Christmas morning, the camera cuts from the lighted tree to a shovel coming from off screen outside at night to bury parents, a boy and a girl in graves; their heads stick out in a line in front of a house, all dead, except for the daughter, whose eyes move slightly in her blue-gray face in close-up and then stop moving. In footage of a kitchen, we see water flooding the floor as a man, a woman and a teen boy sit in the water with their hands tied above their heads; bare wires run from wall sockets to the water, someone throws a switch and the three people are electrocuted with a lot of convulsions (we see dozens of second-degree burns covering the arms of the teen boy). Some silent footage shows a man in a dental chair with thick bands of metal holding his mouth wide open as someone uses a household power drill with a long bit to drill into his upper front teeth and roof of the mouth; blood pours out and the victim shakes and looks like he is screaming. Ghost children ransack a house (two boys can see them, but adults see only objects being thrown as ghosts push and smash a heavy desk onto a man, and hit him in the head with a bag of golf clubs; a boy uses a sickle to cut the man's hand (we see the man bleeds over the kitchen floor and sink), the man smashes the boy's camera and breaks it and we see the boy's face covered in blood spatter and we then see the house burning in tall flames. A man, a woman and a boy are seen tied to wooden crosses in a cornfield and they have hoods over their heads as we see a cigarette lighter in the corner of the screen light a rope fuse running to the man and he goes up in tall flames as he screams and writhes; another man shows up in his SUV and runs down a young boy with a cigarette lighter.
 A demon appears behind a young boy and squeezes his shoulder causing the boy to turn to crumbling rock and dust, revealing his skull and collarbones as he catches fire in tall flames and five ghost children with gray, cracked faces and milky eyes look on, frightened and we see the house consumed in flames from the outside.
 A demon has a mottled black-blue-gray face and long stringy black hair, with black triangles around his puffy dark eyes and his mouth seems scabbed over and his fingers are gray, long claws. A picture of a demon's face appears on a bulletin board beside a headline that reads, "Murder House Burns Down." We see a headline on a computer screen, "Family Slain In Westminster Church" along with a symbol of a demon and blood runs over the glass as a man looking at it gasps and jumps back. A young boy stands in a church and hallucinates large pools of blood. A demon's face shows up in a closet one night after clothing moves by itself on swinging hangers, scaring a young boy in bed and the boy gasps and ducks under covers and the face vanishes. A demon's face shows up in a reflection on a computer screen twice, once in close-up that scares a man who looks at it and shouts in fear. A demon appears on a laptop screen as a reflection and in the background of a photo; a man looks at the photo and the demon begins to move and the man gasps and puts the photo down. A demon's face bursts onto the screen in close-up. A ghost boy tells each of two young brothers that each will be killed and so will his whole family.
 A man knocks on another man's door and the second man appears in the door with a rifle, then beats up the first man with strikes from the rifle butt, kicks, stomps and punches (the beaten man falls down a few steps, rolls on the dirt, and then pulls himself up into an SUV); the attacker says that he will hurt his own wife if the other man shows up again and then kill the man (we see cuts, scrapes and some blood on the beaten man's face). A man screams at one of his young sons at the dinner table and smashes a handful of mashed potatoes into the child's mouth; the mother screams and the action stops. A man takes a picture of a woman in a grocery store and she takes her twin sons and runs out, rushes into their car and speeds home where her ex-husband shows up with a state trooper and demands custody of the boys; when he is stopped he grabs the trooper and threatens him but the trooper says he cannot legally help the ex-husband. Two young boys have several arguments in which they push and choke each other, and one brother, who is slightly larger, taunts the other, bullies him, and finally beats him up with punches and kicks (the other boy's nose and mouth become bloody) and the abusive boy asks their mother if she is going to hit him, like Dad regularly did, and then runs upstairs; the injured boy tells his mother that she allows his brother to keep hurting him.
 A young boy has a recurring nightmare several times of himself walking in his old house with all the walls and windows smeared with blood, as his father beats his mother in the kitchen. In a nightmare a young boy locks himself into a room as his father shouts and beats on the door, rattling the glass panes in it; the boy wakes up shaking and gasping.
 A man looks at a pot upturned in the hallway of an abandoned church and hears clanging; the pot seems to charge toward him and when he hits it with part of a brick, we see a rat run out from under it; the man sees the silhouettes of three children, who are ghosts and the images vanish, he then sees a symbol of a demon that looks like a black circle above a dagger and he gasps as the face and figure of the demon appear before him in close-up, the man shouts, and the image vanishes.
 In a TV horror show, a woman walks with a large knife held above her head and the camera cuts to a close-up of a young boy lying on his back and with blood running out of his mouth. In a picture book, a cartoonish man with big eyes holds a large curved knife high as he looks at four sleeping children in a bed.
 A woman argues with a man in her driveway and swings a small hammer at him, but the argument ends and they become friends. When a woman's ex-husband shows up, she hits him on the chest and walks away. A woman and her young son cry because they must go back to the ex-husband's house because of a court order. We hear that a woman's ex-husband is physically and emotionally abusive and that she is moving with her twin boys to get away from him; the man remains a threat to their lives and mental health and in several scenes she grabs and clutches her boys, causing them to look frightened. A radio plays toy piano music and then we hear female voices screaming in Norwegian as a researcher translates, "Quiet. Bughuul can't hear me above your screaming, Mommy," and a man says the child killed her whole family (the method is not described); as two men listen, the radio stops and then bursts into words on its own. We hear static on a radio and children's singsong voices, and the phrase "Zack is here." A man and a boy share about having nightmares of dead people. A boy points a toy handgun at his brother, who points a toy space gun at him as they argue about who killed whom first and their mother breaks it up. Twin boys argue about five ghost children in their yard and which twin the ghosts like better. A ghost boy taunts first one twin and then the other in two scenes.
 A boy films his abusive father, his mother and his twin brother in his yard from their cornfield, where he stand with five ghost children with decaying faces. A boy aims a slingshot at a large spider on his porch, but does not fire it and the spider crawls away. A hand comes from off-screen and pours a goblet of antifreeze on a floor.
 Two boys brush their teeth at a bathroom sink and we see white spit from both going into the sink and sticking to their lips.

LANGUAGE 5 - About 8 F-words and its derivatives, 2 scatological terms (one muffled), 1 anatomical term, 4 mild obscenities, name-calling (stupid, douche), 1 religious profanity (GD), 5 religious exclamations (e.g. Oh God, God, Jesus! [muffled]).

SUBSTANCE USE - A wine bottle is seen on a side table in a living room, a beer bottle is shown beside a man's plate at dinner (he does not drink from it), a man and woman drink whiskey on a porch and become drunk (they stumble and giggle), a man pours two glasses of whiskey for himself and a colleague in a research office and they both drink, a boy carries a wine bottle to his mother on a tray at a picnic and we see the woman drink wine from her glass, and men and women genuflect and take communion with wine by intincture and by drinking from a goblet. A woman smokes a cigarette on her front porch and says that she does not want her children to know she smokes.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Evil, murder, death, ghosts, demon possession, domestic violence, victims of abuse, parental rights, disadvantage/discrimination of women in divorce, child murderers, curses, superstition, the occult.

MESSAGE - Sometimes overprotective mothers have real reason for concern.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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