'The Devil Inside' possessed by badness
>REVIEWER'S RATING: ★
Ripping cues from the many exorcism-based horror flicks produced since that mother of exorcism movies, The Exorcist, debuted in 1973, The Devil Inside blends standard exorcism movie scenarios with phony “found film” footage of the kind seen in the super-profitable Paranormal Activity movies.
More than anything genuinely scary, this opportunistic, shamelessly obvious blending of horror subgenres results in silliness of the kind seen in the Wayans brothers’ Scary Movie spoofs. If moviegoers, despite widespread bad word of mouth or, heaven forbid, the sincere warnings of conventional film critics, still choose to see The Devil Inside, they may consider thinking of it as an illegitimate Scary Movie sequel. That way, at least, they’ll have a laugh or two.
The only frightening thing about The Devil Inside is how easily so many moviegoers wasted money on it. A total stinker, it nevertheless enjoyed a big opening weekend, exceeding box office predictions by far. The many who made the bad investment of buying a ticket to it should feel horribly ripped off.
Paranormal Activity style, the movie includes those helpful dates that show up in video cameras.
The horror begins Oct. 30, 1989, in South Hartford, Conn. Grainy old police video and TV news footage document a triple murder. Maria Rossi, a suburban wife and mother, slaughtered a priest and two nuns in her home. The local TV news reporter, apparently having never seen The Exorcist or its sequels, doesn’t even suggest the possibility that the bloody scene is a consequence of a botched exorcism.
Fast forward 20 years, Maria’s daughter, Isabella, is collaborating with a filmmaker for a documentary about her trip to Italy to see her mother, longtime inmate at the Centrino Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Initially, the raw footage that Michael (Ionut Grama) shoots is mundanely matter of fact. The intentions of Isabella (Fernanda Andrade), now a young woman, aren’t entirely clear, but she apparently wants to export her mother back to the United States for treatment. She is optimistic and a bit emotional. After all, her mother has been lost to her for 20 years.
Isabella’s first stop in Rome isn’t the hospital where her mother resides. It’s the official Vatican school of exorcism. She quickly hooks up with a pair of maverick priests who don’t just study exorcisms, they perform them.
Simon Quarterman as British priest Ben Rawlings and Evan Helmuth as American priest David Keane portray the earnest young clerics. They seek to relieve the suffering of those they judge the Catholic Church has turned its official back on. In their quest to excise demons the double-teamed exorcists mix religion and science. They measure, for instance, their subjects’ pulse and the dilation of their pupils.
Of course, Isabella and her priestly allies’ good intentions go to hell. All the while, Michael’s filmmaking follows the hand-held, incessantly moving-camera precedents set by previous faux documentaries and found footage features.
It’s annoying but not nearly as grating as the movie in total. Early in the year though it is, The Devil Inside is a top contender for worst mainstream release of 2012.