The Devil Inside (2012) Directed by William Brent Bell. Written by: William Brent Bell and Matthew Peterson. tarring: Fernanda Andrade, Simon Quarterman and Evan Helmuth. IMDB says: “In Italy, a woman becomes involved in a series of unauthorized exorcisms during her mission to discover what happened to her mother, who allegedly murdered three people during her own exorcism.”
Before I begin this review, let me introduce myself. Hello, my name is Marc, and I have a huge boner for horror. It can be foreign horror, cheesy Roger Corman B-movie horror, or my personal favorite; religious horror. So as you can understand, there were very few people more excited than I for the newest exorcism movie, The Devil Inside. I’m here to tell you my friends, my horror boner was wasted.
But before I tell you how The Devil Inside (TDI) gave me the celluloid equivalent to blue balls, I should explain the plot. The Devil Inside (which is “based” on true events) centers around an adult woman filming a documentary about her mother who killed 3 people during an exorcism. The daughter flies to Italy to interview her mother, get a better understanding of how exorcisms work, and finally to see if they’re actually real. I’ll leave you figure out the answer to that last one.
Now my first issue with the movie, I cannot tell you how tired I am of this “found footage” or “fictional documentary” trend that has been around for the last 10 years. Yes, it worked for Blair Witch Project and it gained new life in Paranormal Activity. But for now, tuck it in, cut off the lights, and put that shit to bed because it is tired. This really kept me from falling “into” the movie and losing myself in the story.
After the getting out the “need to knows” in the beginning, the movie really picks up. I must say that TDI has some of the best exorcism scenes I’ve seen in a long time. They were genuinely creepy and weren’t totally blown by the trailers. What I will also give TDI credit for is that it puts a new spin on the exorcism horror genre, a spin that I won’t elaborate on (spoiler free zone up in this piece). TDI does a fantastic job in the middle of the film in creeping you out and does an even better job in ramping up to the climax, and then what happens?
Blue balls. That’s what the fuck happens.
TDI did all this work getting its audience all in a tizzy waiting to see what happens next just to give them a lackluster-ass ending (lackluster wasn’t descriptive enough so I had to put ‘ass’ at the end to fully convey my level of anger). But to further add insult to injury, not only did TDI give an ending that reeked of WTF, they then direct the audience to go to the website www.therossifiles.com to help with the investigation. Now if the website contained a petition for them to reshoot the ending, I would think about clicking it.
All in all, if you don’t count the last 2 minutes, TDI delivers a pretty standard horror movie, which isn’t really saying much about horror movies these days. If you’re in the cine-plex looking for a decent scare, by all means see it. If you’re a die-hard horror fan such as myself, wait for it on Blu Ray.
