Why anyone thought they needed to remake 2004’s District B13 is beyond me. I guess Luc Besson found a few days to churn this out for someone who had a few bucks to spend. They reeled in Paul Walker as the lead and invited David Belle back for another round (there was a sequel in 2009).

Brick Mansions takes place in Detroit. A large slum has been walled off from the rest of the city where crime runs rampant. An undercover cop (Paul Walker) gets help from an ex-con (David Belle) to try and stop a crime lord’s plan to level downtown Detroit. District B13 is most notable for introducing the world to parkour. David Belle is one of the pioneers of the sport and the free running stunts and choreography gave action fans something new and exciting to watch. The same is on display here with Belle strutting his stuff, something I’m sure Jackie Chan is impressed with.

If you’ve never seen DB13, then what’s here could seem pretty fresh to you. It’s an average action movie in general and RZA being cast as the main villain doesn’t do the movie any favors. While not his worse performance, RZA isn’t a good actor so there’s not a big well of praise to dip into for him. There’s some great stunt work and fight choreography here and there but there’s not much else to raise this movie to its above average status.

Sinister is a decent ghost/demon horror movie. The writer/director Scott Derrickson is a horror movie maker who’s been quite busy in the genre for the passed decade or so. Sinister stars Ethan Hawke as Ellison Oswalt, a true-crime novelist. It’s been awhile since his last hit novel and he moves his family into a home that’s had a rather gruesome murder in it to help him write about what happened there. He finds a box of 8mm film in the attic which gives him huge leads on the crimes he wants to write about. It also awakens a demon that pulls Ellison and his family into the darkness of a decades long killing path, If Ellison can make it through, he has the novel of a lifetime in his hands.

Very easy on the gore front, Sinister goes more for the creepy scares. Lot’s of shadows, things that go bump in the night type of stuff. The movie is well put together and has some good ideas in it, but it’s a bit long in the tooth. It slowly builds up until the last 10 minutes or so where everything comes together. An angle with Elllison’s son is started near the beginning and then completely dropped in favor of focusing solely on Ellison. In fact after that, the son is basically forgotten for the rest of the movie. There’s some great tension build up throughout, but the “monster” of the movie looks like a professional wrestler more than a demon so his visual impact undermines his impressive stalking capabilities

I thought the end was pretty creative, but it’s an easy movie to forget when one or two of these types of demon/possession movies  come out every single year. It’s a packed field with Insidious, Mama, The Conjuring, Paranormal Activity and all of their sequels. It gets hard to remember which ones I’ve seen and which one is new.  ‘Tis the season for this kind of movie, but I found Sinister to be a middle of the road affair.