Year:  2012
Genre:  Horror
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Fernanda Andrade, Simon Quarterman, Evan Helmuth, Ionut Grama, Suzan Crowley
Director:  William Brent Bell
Run time:  83 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

     The Devil Inside is one of those handheld documentary style horror movies that seemed so new and fresh ten years ago when The Blair Witch Project led into Diary of the Dead and Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity and so forth.  It remains an effective style, because it can still create sudden creepiness and some decent scares.

     But to stand out, a movie needs to do something I haven’t seen before.  I am so familiar with this genre now that I can pretty much telegraph every coming scene long before it arrives on screen.  And so it is with The Devil Inside, which adds nothing new to an already overdone genre.  There are some good moments and some good camerawork, especially when the possessed people contort their bodies in all kinds of gruesome and humanly impossible ways.  There are also some solid acting performances, notably from the two guys who play the young priests performing exorcisms that are unsanctioned by their Vatican superiors.

     But every time the movie started to get interesting it reverted to the same old formula.  I thought for a moment that there would be a really interesting conversation about science and theology and the connection between the two when it came to exorcisms, but it ended as quickly as it began, and it was right back to the demons and the panic.  The Devil Inside is about as average as horror films get – it’s on DVD May 15^th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 at 8:11 am and is filed under 2012, Horror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.