If you like your horror movies dark, suspenseful, very bloody and fairly clever, you can do a lot worse than SINISTER.
From the producers of "Insidious", which was one of the scariest films I've seen in recent years, Sinister stars Ethan Hawke as a true-crime writer who likes to move his family into towns with a recent serial killer and write novels about the town's murders.
As the film opens, Oswalt (Hawke) is just arriving in a small town with a tough sheriff, a deputy drawn to Oswalt's fame and a particularly nasty recent hanging of a whole family in their back yard and the disappearance of their youngest daughter.
Moving into the home of the victims, the creepiness starts almost immediately when the author finds a box full of Super 8 films in the attic.
These films feature footage of the recently murdered family having fun together in the yard, playing together and then graphic footage of their hanging. So who shot the Super 8 footage.
Hawke is really good as he starts playing the additional films and discovers a very gory history and a very present evil.
Lots of loud bumps, fast scares, graphic violence and one of the creepiest music scores in years by Christopher Young (Spiderman 3) ensue and kept me on edge and anxious around every dark, horrible corner.
The story is really simple and at the same time pretty clever and its well executed.
It's also VERY graphic and pretty intense.
Hey, M. Night Shyamalan: remember how you tried to scare us with a lawn mower in your horrible movie, The Happening? Yeah, check this out, THIS is the way to scare an audience with a lawn mower. I actually jumped!
A truly sinister little B.
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