“The Devil Inside” should get out of theaters

The horror-movie genre is one that’s often unfairly known for its low standards… “The Devil Inside”

Directed by William Brent Bell

Starring: Fernanda Andrade, Simon Quarterman

Grade: F

The horror-movie genre is one that’s often unfairly known for its low standards. This is because movies with ample advertising like “The Devil Inside” plague movie-goers, while truly creative and innovative horror films garner smaller measures of success.

If we’re to take the principles of song mash-ups and apply them to movies, “The Devil Inside” is “The Blair Witch Project,” “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” and “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” combined into one film. Hear me out on this. With the shaky, filmed-it-myself camera shots of “Blair Witch,” the exorcism conventions of “Emily Rose” and the “searching my mother’s past” component of “Ya-Ya,” this movie sparkles with mediocrity.

It’s not that the movie is, in itself, some kind of awful monstrosity. Rather, it’s tired. It’s taking overused, cliched ideas and packaging them together, hoping we won’t feel like we’ve seen it all before. Perhaps in the age of the Internet we’ve become jaded by the sheer number of films out there, but worse than laughably awful, this film is almost totally forgettable.

The movie kicks off with Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade), who, after years of growing up in a mystery-shrouded and motherless atmosphere, has decided to investigate her mother’s odd crime — murdering three people — and its even stranger religious connections — the killings took place during an exorcism. She decides to make a documentary and go to Italy to learn about exorcisms, the Catholic Church and what can be done for her mother who currently resides, heavily medicated, in a psychiatric ward.

Traveling with Isabella is the cynical and barely tolerable Michael (Ionut Grama), her cinematographer. There’s absolutely no background discussed on how these two got together, and even less insight into what their current relationship is. Over the course of the film, it remains unclear whether they’re friends or just two strangers stuck together. After a particularly difficult interaction with her terrifying mother, as Isabella cries in obvious distress, Michael excitedly tells Isabella they got some great shots — he’s either completely oblivious or an incredible jerk.

Fortunately, clergymen Ben (Simon Quarterman) and David (Evan Helmuth) are mega-priestly badasses who perform unsanctioned exorcisms on the side. They take Isabella on one of their missions before deciding to tackle what is apparently the biggest, baddest demon takeover of all time — Isabella’s mother.

They somehow convince her psychiatric ward to let them run some tests and then proceed to try to exorcise this demon. No one’s sure if they’re ever successful or not, but Isabella’s mother’s vital signs drop back to normal, and she seems considerably improved. Afterward, as they listen to the tapes of the exorcism, Ben claims he hears four voices, meaning multiple demonic possessions. But, wait, aren’t their four main characters? Cue creepy and obvious foreshadowing music.

Part of the problem from the get-go is that we never get a feel for Isabella: What was her life like after her mother went to jail? What kind of person is she? What financial situation allows her to completely neglect her previous life and run off to Italy? This total lack of character development plagues the entire film. Everyone is such a sketch of a person that the audience feels completely ambivalent toward their mission and fates. Whatever happens, happens. After all, none of these people are likable or even hateable enough for viewers to hope for any particular outcome.

With so little to go on, the only things the audience seems to react to are the surprising jumpy moments — of which there are plenty. But even these come from very contrived situations. Look, we get it — in horror movies the victim always runs upstairs. Do we really need to perform exorcisms of evil, violent demons in rooms with walls full of potential or actual weapons? The protagonists always seem to be trying to save others’ souls in basements with tools on the walls, employing onlydelicate fabric ties on the possessees’ wrists and ankles.

Worse yet, nearly every scene is nauseating thanks to the home-camera shaky-hands problem. Unlike “Paranormal Activity,” which managed to skirt around this issue by using mounted home cameras, this movie almost exclusively uses unstably filmed footage.

And yet another snag in an already bumpy cinematic ride: The dialogue is totally unbelievable. Whereas the “you complete me”s of romantic comedies aren’t realistic either, they’re something most people desire to hear. The lines in this movie, while trying to mimic reality, are flat and totally uninteresting — at times even inappropriate, as demonstrated in Michael’s previously mentioned inappropriate excitement.

Overall, this film is not very good — but worse, it’s pretty much forgettable. With flat characters, uninteresting dialogue and a plot that we’ve experienced over and over again, it’s likely to become obscure pretty quickly.

*Editor’s Note: A change was made to clarify the fact that while the film did not have a large budget, the movie advertising was backed by Paramount Pictures.