Film Reviews

The Devil Inside

• Rating:
• Director: William Brent Bell
• Starring: Evan Helmuth
• Details: US/87mins 16

The "found footage" sub-genre has quickly become tiresome, and the third film executed in such a manner released in so many weeks is by far the poorest. While Chronicle found a new slant on the superhero genre and Project X embraced it in the right spirit, this exorcism thriller is an amateurish retread.
Opening in 1989 at a still fresh crime scene, we find that a woman has gone and killed three members of her church. Naturally thrown into the nuthouse, it turns out that it was not her that off'd the aforementioned Christians, but rather the... wait for it DEVIL INSIDE. Said unhinged woman's daughter, Isabella (Fernanda Andrade) decides to set about finding out what happened, and grabs a camera man and heads on over to Italy to find some cross wielding badass priests to perform an exorcism.
The hilarious tagline to this piece of shit declares "the movie the Vatican didn't want you to see." Who knew the spiritual powers that be were so on the money with their cinematic observations? Ripping off everything from The Last Exorcism to (naturally) The Exorcist, and most brazenly, Paranormal Activity, there are many things wrong with The Devil Inside, but the main one is that it's essentially one big cliché, wrapped in a blanket of jarry handheld camera work. You just can't make this type of movie with a straight face anymore unless you're doing something innovative and this is everything but.
Performance wise there's really not a lot the cast can do with the material they've been given. They've obviously been told to play everything straight up, but that results in far too many inappropriate chuckles.
Awful, just awful. The only fright you'll get from this will be when you're woken by the cinema lights going up.