Devil Inside, The (2012)

I’m not exactly sure what they were going for here. Is it supposed to be scary? Are we supposed to view it as something based on a true story? I’ll fill you in on what I took from this movie, and let you be the judge.

‘The Devil Inside’ begins with the aftermath of a woman that killed three people who were trying to perform an exorcism on her, after which she is put away in a hospital for the criminally insane. Years later, her daughter, a twenty-something college student, is seeking out the truth behind the events of that night. She teams up with a pair of young priests who are known for performing exorcisms not approved by the church. They manage to perform an exorcism on the woman’s mother once; they don’t get a second chance.

Let’s get this over with…

Forty-five minutes into the movie I almost fell asleep. I’m not exaggerating. For those that have seen “The Last Exorcism”, this movie sort of opens like that. But imagine the scene that gives a back story on the preacher being forty-five minutes long. That’s all it is. The movie is half-way over and all you’ve seen so far is the woman visiting her mother, visiting a college, talking to priests, and talking to her camera-man.

Volume appears to be the only method of fear the director knows how to portray. The movie itself is set to a low volume, but when a dog barks or a woman screams, the volume shoots through the roof, almost as if the dog had a microphone strapped to its collar. They rely heavily on this method to try and be “jumpy”.

The “mother” character that appears in all of the trailers and the movie poster, and the opening scene, leads you to believe she is the main character of the film. This is not the case. She’s only actually in two scenes, one where her daughter is visiting and the other when her daughter and the priests are doing an exorcism. She’s actually not a bad actor, which might explain why they couldn’t afford for her to be in the rest of the film. Instead they have the “demon” jump from body to body so the focus keeps changing. Realistically this was done in order to save money on an already low-budget film.

The movie is not scary. It’s not even entertaining. Actually, toward the end, I was getting nauseous from watching the camera jump around so damn much. Very reminiscent of ‘The Blair Witch Project’, in that department. When I watched ‘Quarantine’, I never felt nauseous, I never complained about the camera, actually after a while I forgot I was watching the movie through the eyes of a handheld camera – THAT’S the way it should be.

Quite possibly the cheesiest ending I’ve ever seen. The woman, her camera-man, and the priest are driving to the church, with the now-possessed woman unconscious in the backseat. She wakes up and starts fighting with the priest, meanwhile the camera-man now seems to be possessed as well, and drives the car into oncoming traffic. The movie fades to black and puts a web address on the screen, telling the viewers to visit the site for more information. What the hell? Was this movie just one big advertisement for the website? Or, more likely, they just had no idea how to end the movie so they wrote whatever came to their mind. “Just have everyone get possessed and crash.” Was there no one there to step up and say “Wait. No. That ending sucks.”

In closing, I’d recommend never watching this garbage. It will leave you feeling unsatisfied as a movie watcher and as a horror fan. I was literally pissed off that I wasted my time on it, but if that means someone else reads this and doesn’t watch it, then I guess it was worth it.

Cheers and goodnight.