Sinister

Most horror movies today seem to bring the gore and the guts, but lack the spirit and the fun over why horror movies are such a good time. Not many these days bring both elements to the table keeping a good balance between the terror given to your eyes and the terror given to your mind. Sinister is quite the exception actually, showing that you don't need shit splattered every two seconds to give a good scare.

Sinister stars Ethan Hawke as Ellison, a writer who gets his buck off of writing novels about graphic murders. He's presented more material than he was ready for by investigating his new case, where a little girl goes missing but the rest of her family is found hanging around in trees....literally. After discovering tapes of previous graphic murders of entire families, he realizes that the cases are connected and that the culprit is a lot closer than originally imagined.

Sinister can be quite bonechilling at times. The scenes of the previous murders will easily resonate in your memory for weeks, possibly even months to come. Families are tied to chairs that are being pushed into pools, families have their throats slit, are burned alive in cars, and in easily the most disturbing of them all....you watch a family have an unpleasant, very close encounter with a lawn mower. Weirdest thing is that you rarely see anything on the films, but they hit you as if you were watching a local news story depicting a graphic crime. Creepy shit.

Sinister also doesn't overcomplicate things which is a large strength that plays to the movie's success. There aren't 10,000 characters that show up in 1 scene just to be slaughtered, there aren't 1 million other subplots, and the story doesn't feel the need to overcomplicate things just for the saking of confusing the hell out of everyone. There is a big twist at the end (which is also quite thrilling), but the movie still manages to stay on track as opposed to falling off the cliff at the very end.

I do have some minor nitpicks about Sinister though. They are very minor, but I felt if these things were quite different, the movie could have been even stronger. At times, the movie feels like a dead ringer to The Ring (no pun intended). Evil videotapes with monsters that pounce after a certain amount of time is certainly a creepy idea, but at times it almost feels like a spin-off of The Ring as opposed to a fresh idea. And, I felt that the movie took a bit of time to kick off. It goes from about 20mph to 90mph, just when you feel like it's going nowhere, Sinister begins to slay. Despite these nitpickings, Sinister still proves that if the talent is present, a simple idea can really deliver on the premise of creating pure evil.

3/4