How Bad Is It?! “The Devil Inside”

Head of the UTG film department and mastermind behind Reasonable Remakes, Justin Proper has brought us another new column. Ladies and gentleman, allow us to introduce you to: How Bad Is It?

Movies are the number one source of entertainment according to a statistic I just made up. Everyone loves going to the movies. It’s a standard date night, and has helped millions of teens awkwardly hold hands in the dark. Movies are a great escape from reality, and help people relieve the stress of their lives. Unfortunately every once in a while a movie gets released that ruins the experience…

Horror is one of my favorite genres. Nothing is more fun to me than going to a midnight release of a highly anticipated scary movie and seeing all the other people in the theater jump and scream. It is a pure joy to me in this bleak world. It had been a while since I had the opportunity to attend such a release, so I eagerly headed to the theater last night around midnight to get my fix. The theater was packed. I sat up front and still had people on each side of me. As the theater darkened, I got excited. The suspense was building but I had no idea that it would never go anywhere, for this was about to become one of the most non-frightening “horror” films I had ever seen…

The Movie

 

The Devil Inside starts off with the footage from a police inspection of a crime scene of a triple homicide that occured in 1989. It was very reminiscent of the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, except that it was not scary at all and looked pretty fake. This sets up that three members of the clergy were murdered during an attempted exorcism. The film then cuts to the present, where we find out that Isabella Rossi is making a documentary about her mother, AKA the person that killed the clergy members in 1989. The rest of the movie is a documentary style film set in Rome as Isabella tries to figure out what happened to her mother, who is now in an insane asylum for criminals located within Vatican City. She partners up with some priests studying at the school for exorcism who are performing exorcisms on people that the church deemed as not possessed. These renegade priests (who say things like “fuck” and “shit” because that makes them edgy) decide to help Isabella because they believe her mom is harboring a super demon and they want to help her. Without ruining the god awful ending I’ll tell you that everything totally goes to hell (heh) and it becomes a struggle for everyones lives.

"Oh dear god, what are we watching?!" -Everyone at the theater

My Thoughts:

The trailers for The Devil Inside made it look like a decent exorcism movie. There was even a marketing campaign that showed audiences being scared during the movie. By all means, the movie should have been at least mediocre, and I’m guessing everyone at the sold out theater assumed the same. The critics reviews aren’t very kind, as the movie sits at 8% on Rotten Tomatoes. The only positive review I found for this movie came from a critic who must have been paid off.

 

How Bad Is It?

 

I really hoped this movie would at least be mildly entertaining. Everyone was talking about how much they wanted to see it, and I had to see what the hype was about. I gave The Devil Inside a chance but I was let down. The documentary gimmick got quite old, quite fast. The “confession” cam from the filmmaker and Isabella were dry and forced, missing an opportunity to give these characters real depth. Also, there was a lot of footage from other possessions and asylum footage of Isabella’s mother that was supposed to be disturbing and unsettling, but it just came off as cheesy and kind of schtick-y, almost Youtube-esque.

She's not possessed, she's just head-banging to Metallica.

The “jump-scares” in the movie were so poorly set up that only one person in my packed theater screamed. Just one. It’s really not that hard to set those up, in fact, I would say it is harder to fuck them up as badly as The Devil Inside did. It is almost like the director said “Ok guys, we’re going to make a scary movie, but I don’t want it to be scary at all.”. The only scene that was even remotely scary or disturbing was during one of the exorcisms when the possessed girl started having an explosive period and got blood on the ceiling camera.

Like this, but from her "special area".

The bottom line is, there was a completely packed theater and as soon as the movie ended almost every single person leaving was saying things such as “What a waste of money,” or “That was complete bullshit.” And I have never had that experience before in my moviegoing life. Unless you are really scared of contortionists (apparently possessed people tie themselves in knots with their limbs) you will not find The Devil Inside very scary at all.

6 years of yoga and all she got was possessed.

P.S. So how bad was it? I used a gift certificate from Christmas to see this movie, and now I feel bad that my Aunt got me such a shitty gift.

Justin Proper recently found a rip in the time-space continuum and is going back in time to help humanity. If Germany loses WWII then he was successful. You can follow him on twitter.

 

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2 Responses to “How Bad Is It?! “The Devil Inside””

  1. the enigma says:

    All I can really say is…HA!

  2. When I see a possession movie thats bad, I like to picture that instead of being possessed, the person is just really wasted, I mean i contort myself sometimes if I’ve had enough to drink.