More like “The Devil Inside Your Wallet”

Welcome to the month of monsters, the list of nightmares, the event of a deathtime: THE MASSACRE MARATHON! I thought I would kick of the celebration of horror with “The Devil Inside”, directed by William Brent Bell. I shouldn’t have. No, really- I shouldn’t have. I would be able to make a long list of things that were wrong with this movie, but since I will be doing at least 33 reviews this month I will keep it short.

When this movie hit theaters I was ready to see it with a mediocre amount of excitement. Then I started to hear about how bad it was and I stayed away from it. Now I see what they meant. The film was just a late cash-in copycat of previous “found footage” movies. If you saw any of the Paranormal Activity trilogy or the *ALMOST great The Last Exorcism then there is literally nothing new this film has to offer. I’m not sure the people who were involved in the production of this movie could sleep at night due to the fact that their movie was garbage or that they were blatantly ripping off other movies in the genre. Who knows? Maybe if this was the first “found footage” horror bit I would look at it differently…

SATANIC SPOILERS

The contortionist stuff was pretty jarring and I liked the car ride sequence, even if it was extremely predictable (as was every other part, in hindsight). About midway through it seemed as if the characters just decided to stop acting rationally for no apparent reason. The contrast between the two exorcismers(?) exercisers(??) …priests…got over the top and comical, like the actors were trying too hard to keep their jobs. The best scene was when the main girl sees her mother for the first time in years in a mental institution. All of a sudden there is bucket-loads of anticipation and suspense. I was waiting for the mom to jump up and rip her daughter’s face off! If the whole movie kept me on the edge of my seat like that this review would have an opposite outcome.

I refuse to recommend this movie when there are a group of films in the same genre with a greater scare factor. The Devil Inside could have been a chilling Exorcist meets Paranormal if it had enough time to develop into its own fresh story. I give The Devil Inside 2 cookie-cutter pentagrams out of 5.

★★

“I’m telling you Will, we need this shot to captivate the lesbians in the audience!”