Caged and waiting to be eaten. Visited by the dead at nightfall. Asked to climb into the oven to clean it. The characters in The Green Inferno, Sinister 2, and The Visit are faced with horror of many forms, and while their scary situations are vastly different from one another, all of their stories can now be experienced on Blu-ray.
The Green Inferno: Hopeful for change, the student activists travel to the Amazon rainforest to save a tribe threatened by deforestation, only to be captured by the natives and placed on the menu. In The Green Inferno, Eli Roth exposes viewers to a palpable sense of primal fear, realistically placing his young cast of well-meaning characters in a horrifying “what if?” situation made all the more real by the filming location: a village deep in the jungles of Peru.
Although Roth’s unique brand of humor takes precedence over the pure horror of the film a few too many times, the infectious fear of being someone else’s meal is consistently brought to life by a game cast led by Lorenza Izzo and bolstered by strong supporting turns from Daryl Sabara and Nicolás Martínez. Overall, Roth populates the film with some of his most likable characters to date (as well as one of his most hated antagonists). The violence may peak early in the second act, but it’s always shocking and should be hard to watch even for some of the most hardened horror fans.
Released on January 5th from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, The Green Inferno Blu-ray dives into the remarkable real life adventure behind the making of Roth’s latest movie. Special features include a photo gallery and an audio commentary with Roth, producer Nicolás López, and stars Izzo, Aaron Burns, Kirby Bliss Blanton, and Sabara, giving fans a hearty helping of new content to chew on.
Sinister 2: It’s the same at every crime scene: a family of corpses and a missing child—the handiwork of the entity known as Bughuul, an otherworldly being who influences children into killing their families and filming it Super 8 style before joining his growing ranks of ghostly followers. Ex-Deputy So & So (James Ransone) is well aware of Bughuul. He saw what the entity was capable of doing in the events of the first Sinister film, and now, in the 2015 sequel, he’s hell-bent on keeping a mother (Shannyn Sossamon) and her twin sons (Robert Daniel Sloan and Dartanian Sloan) out of his possessive path.
Directed by Ciarán Foy and written by Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, Sinister 2 expands upon the home video aspect of the original by showing how a child becomes convinced to pull out a Super 8 camera and kill their family in the first place. Nighttime visits from pale spectral children ensue, and though their presence in this film isn’t as unnerving as the attic-dwellers from the first movie, it’s nice to see an attempt at refocusing the story to avoid too much retread the second time around.
While it’s tough to top the Ethan Hawke-led cast of Sinister, Ransone gamely leaps from supporting player to lead actor in the sequel, giving an accessible and humorous performance as the scared-out-of-his-shoes So & So. Shannyn Sossamon is also fantastic as a single mom doing her damnedest to keep her boys from the heavy hand of their father.
Ultimately it’s Ransone and Sossamon who do much of the film’s heavy lifting, their chemistry so believable and earnest that I wish I could see these same characters in a romantic drama. Sinister 2 is first and foremost a horror film, however, and while it’s not as creepily imagined as its predecessor, it still raises more than a few goosebumps with its unnerving home video (aka "kill film") lineup and eerie score by tomandandy. You might never view Christmas quite the same way after seeing one kill film in particular.
The Sinister 2 Blu-ray (released on January 12th) is highlighted by extended cuts of the Super 8 kill films and an informative audio commentary with director Ciarán Foy, who offers insightful breakdowns of how specific scenes were shot and tells the incredible story of how Twitter helped get him the directing gig for Sinister 2.
The Visit: It doesn’t take long for Rebecca (Olivia DeJonge) and her younger brother, Tyler (Ed Oxenbould), to realize that something isn’t right with their grandparents. Strange scurries and scratching can be heard outside their bedroom door at night—a door they’re not supposed to open after 9:30pm. In his latest film, M. Night Shyamalan effectively transforms grandma and grandpa’s house—what should be a safe haven—into a place filled with home-cooked horrors.
Playing an elderly couple seeing their grandchildren for the first time, Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie are nothing short of stellar in their approach to the story. Whether crawling on all fours underneath the house or asking Rebecca to climb into the oven to clean it, Dunagan in particular does an excellent job straddling the line between dementia and pure madness, helping to keep the story in an ambiguous light for much of the runtime.
As good as Dunagan and McRobbie are, though, it’s the younger actors who steal the show. DeJonge and Oxenbould present one of the most believable brother/sister duos I’ve seen onscreen, their humorous back-and-forth banter just as enjoyable as any of the film’s perfectly timed jolts. Becca and Tyler are real (and brilliant) kids. They come into Shyamalan’s tale with real-life problems—issues that present themselves over time. These well-developed characters add a welcome emotional weight to The Visit, making the film’s descent into disturbing depths all the more frightening.
Though the landing could have been smoother, The Visit overall is a genuinely scary film. Working without studio involvement on a smaller budget, Shyamalan created his most intimate movie in years.
Released on January 5th, The Visit Blu-ray contains a featurette that further explores Shyamalan’s approach to making a smaller film, and the special features also include an alternate ending that—while well-acted—doesn’t offer a very different scenario from the original film’s conclusion. It’s the deleted scenes that are the real treasure here, allowing viewers the chance to spend more time with Nana and Pop Pop.