'Devil' Serves the Right Hand of Unintentional Comedy

Now there's a face that should be intimidating, but if anything it's comedic.

January or more specifically, the first weekend in January, is always one filled with dread. It’s almost a traditional dumping ground for the worst of the worst with films thrown into a post-holiday messy mix. 2012 is no exception. What better way to kick off a brand new year than a good old-fashioned exorcism or two. Now if 2010’s The Last Exorcism and last year’s The Rite hadn’t satisfied such a demonic appetite, director William Brent Bell attempts to possess legions of horror and found footage fans with The Devil Inside. 

The Devil Inside is a faux documentary tracing the various stages of the demonic possession of Maria Rossi (Suzan Rowley), who murdered three of her fellow clergy in 1989. Twenty years pass and her daughter, Isabella (Fernanda Andrade), with cameraman friend in tow, venture to Rome to uncover the truth of Maria’s condition and the fine line between mental illness and possession.

The Devil Inside is one of those films that is a genre that has gone from being a sincere fright fest to a mockery of the subject matter. It doesn’t make matters any better that there is not one single moment when the audience is hanging on to the armrests in the theater. Where The Devil Inside should be scary, it’s dull and uninteresting and is nothing more than a prelude to another boring moment. 

The movie starts out with the 1989 murders, followed by a series of news reports and eventually bringing everything up to the present. The opening underwhelmingly teases what Bell has the audience in store for the rest of the movie and that is not very much to look forward too. The three murders are nothing that hasn’t been seen time and time again and the specifics of the positions and locations are hardly touched on, giving hardly any importance to what should be The Devil Inside’s initial catalyst.

Maria’s possession isn’t a crucial to the plot as it should be and often acts as a secondary story to a more generalist approach at documenting demonic possessions. A hefty portion of the film’s first half is the daughter learning the difference between mental illness and possession, throwing her mother’s case and importance to the backside. Rowley isn’t given the screen time she deserves and the time she is given is wasted on riddles about mutilation and mood disorder rather than possession. 

The film lacks tension when focusing on exorcism research rather than scare tactics, pouring out a combination of scientific and religious terms that are more trivial if anything. There is too much talking and too little focus on the problem that this film intended to convey.  When nothing happens to long periods of time, there is that urging temptation to glance at the time every few minutes or close your eyes from boredom rather than fear.

It’s obvious that the Vatican would not condone such a movie that paints a handful of priests as taking manner into their own hands as a result of the Church keeping their hands clean of the worst cases in possession. None of the priests depicted in The Devil Inside came off as genuine men of the cloth, particularly those who tended to throw in an extra four-letter-word here and there just for a failed audience reaction. The two main priests recruited by a troubled Isabella have as much unique character as this film does from being a standout in the genre. 

The film just lacks any serious tone and with most of scenes taking place during the day, there is no effort at playing mind games with the audience. Absent are many scenes where there is a lack of lighting. An excess of light, particularly in a horror film, doesn’t brood well for establishing a chilling tone. Levitations and speaking in foreign tongues are hardly frightening. Simply put, a horror movie that doesn’t even meet these certain expectations fails as not only a horror film, but more importantly a cohesive film.

There is no reason for the horror genre to be subjected to be in the same company as abysmal work as “The Devil Inside.” Just as the film expresses a fine line between science and religion, hereto is there a much finer line between a film that at least tries to be an exorcism documentary and another that proudly reeks of its abominations.  

GRADE: D (2/10)
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