The Devil Inside

The Devil Inside (2012)

7% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 44 reviews)

Runtime: 87 minutes (although it seems like the final 10 of those are comprised of the slowest-moving end credits you'll ever see)

Directed by: William Brent Bell

Starring: Fernandina Andrade, Simon Quarterman, Evan Helmuth, Ionut Grama

From: Paramount Insurge (a new sub-studio which will release movies just like this; yep, the found footage thing isn't going away anytime soon)

Oh boy, this movie... it may be the worst of 2012 that I see! I don't do worst-of lists as I don't seek out current bad movies like I do current good ones. However, if I see one worse this year, I'll be surprised. Thank goodness I saw this at the Silver Moone Drive-In, located in Lakeland. If it was located closer to where I live I'd go there more often. You can watch two movies for a grand total of only $4! That is an amazing deal. After hearing all the toxic reviews I figured that would be the best way to see this movie; I was correct. I saw it and then watched Paranormal Activity 3 again. PA3 is SO much better in comparison.

Now, onto this movie; to use a popular joke, the INXS song of the same name is quite a bit better than the movie. In fact, I think I'd rather commit autoerotic asphyxiation than watch the film again! Here's the reason why:

As the marketing for the movie has explained (it worked rather well, given this actually earned over 30 million bucks at the box office, shocking everyone; starting today, though, I imagine the auditoriums will be rather barren for screenings of this), there's a woman named Maria Rossi who went crazy one night in 1989. She killed three members of the clergy who were trying to exorcise her. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity and she ended up at a mental hospital in Rome, Italy, because... well, that's what the script said they should do. Note that from the fake news footage you see (the best part of the movie, you could argue) the murders were committed in Connecticut. Anyhow, 20 years later her daughter Isabella (Andrade) takes a documentary dude (Grama) and go to Italy to meet up with old mom. They end up being buddies with two renegade priests (yes, you read that right; they were played by Helmuth and Quarterman) who perform exorcisms outside the realm of the Church. From there than fantastic foursome do some exorcisms and try to get old mom right.

The main problem is that this movie just isn't all that scary or terrifying. I mean, not at all. The exorcism scenes you see, for example, are pathetic in comparison to The Exorcist, to list the most famous example in the possessed genre. Everything, from the actual scares to the rites performed, are amateur hour and don't get the heart rate raised. You also get a bunch of not so greatly performances and a lot of arguing and characters acting stupid and doing the wrong things. Shockingly, this did not make me enjoy watching this claptrap or wondering what would happen next.

Some “shocking” plot twists happen and then suddenly, the movie stops rather than ends. THAT is what gotten so many people upset with the film. I mean, there have been reports of people booing, throwing stuff at the screen, and what have you. I didn't get quite that reaction at the drive-in but I imagine a lot of those people weren't happy. I know I wasn't delighted! This movie is just a waste of time; don't even bother ever trying to watch it, even if it's on The Movie Channel by this time next year.

I'll spend the rest of this giving out some SPOILERS as I have to in order to talk about something involving the end of the film. If you don't want to read that, you can stop reading and I'll tell you I'll be back Friday night.

Now, onto the spoilers. The ending is that three of the characters end up in a car and they have to drive somewhere. Suddenly, something happens to the driver and the car gets crashed. Then... that is where the movie ends, and you are asked to go to this website for further details. That seemed to imply that the rest of the story would be finished there.

Problem is, the story does NOT get finished there! I couldn't believe what I saw instead. What you got was an incredibly amateurish website (why they went that route, I'll never understand) filled with misspellings and a blatant continuity error involving a big detail of where the documentary filmmaker filmed his first flick. It's just ridiculous and makes the middle finger ending a double bird once you know the website is a giant waste of time. I mean, the videos you see on the site look to be the first few results that they got when someone searched “exorcisms” on YouTube and they pasted the results on there!