As many movie fans know, January is a terrible month for released films coming out. The film quality of January-released movies is usually very low, and for a person like me living in Michigan, it is usually better to just watch the snow fall. The year 2012 was no better for January-released movies. Stinkers like One for the Money, Red Tails and the very crappy limited release horror film, Beneath the Darkness were released. The Devil Inside was released in this month but it was one of the more interesting ones. It brought something a little different to the horror genre and was one of the films from the January pool that really could have been something but it still really missed it's mark.
The Devil Inside is an exorcist/Cathohic religion-themed movie. It is the story a middle-aged woman traveling to Rome in 2009 to find her mentally unstable mother who was put away due to a killing that happened during an exorcism twenty years before.
The movie is filmed in the documentary found footage style. I usually like found footage movies but I didn't like this one. It seemed as if the entire film was trying to copy the other successful found footage films of the past decade without looking at the bigger picture. The found footage style here is really unnecessary and gives the film an uneven quality and is the main reason that the film is not scary.
Just like the film Rite did in 2011, The Devil Inside setting is in the Vatican. While this is an interesting setting, there really is no passion to this film and the director William Brent Bell doesn't seem to know much about the place or the subject. This seems to be just thrown together and again Bell seems to be just trying to piggy-back on the success of the previous found footage films.
In just about every part of the film, we don't really care about the characters who are very dry and not developed and frankly it gets worse as the film goes on. Most of the characters are witless with no real soul or even human-like qualities. That said, the character David does starts to change and this gives the film a new approach that kind of fits.
The ending is frankly bad. I do get the feeling that Bell didn't quite know what to do with the ending and it seems thrown together and makes everything before seem meaningless; it is that bad.
I don't mind exorcist type movies but there hasn't been one done right in a long time. As a matter of fact, I think this subject matter only really worked once and that was in The Exorcist in the 1970's and now these movies just seem to be trendy and geared to the teen crowd. Because of it's religious theme, I will say that The Devil Inside is really a sin and just an all-around wrong discombobulated creation of a film. Avoid.
1.5/5
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