Review No.93: The Devil Inside

Let me start this review with saying that I'm a big fan of The Exorcist I feel that it has a lot to say about faith, family and the church however it seems to have inspired a crop of films that seek to emulate it in some way. Modern examples include The Exorcism of Emily Rose and last year's Anthony Hopkins vehicle The Rite now we have another exorcist rip-off in The Devil Inside. While not a found footage film, like the recently reviewed Project X, The Devil Inside is filmed as a documentary as Isabella Rossi tries to discover why her mother Maria killed two priests and a nun twenty years ago. After doing some snooping she finds out that the assembled religious characters were there to perform an exorcism on her however the devil inside her instead over-powered them and killed them off. Isabella tracks down two priests, Ben and David, who perform backstreet exorcism without the knowledge of the church and whom she believes could sort out the mystery of her mother once and for all. After footage of Maria's exorcism is shot by documentary-maker Michael, Ben and David try to use it as a way of convincing the church elders to believe their theories however they still shrug it off. Obviously things don't end well for our quartet with bleeding palms, a botched baptism and a couple of unlucky nurses all popping up in the film's final ten minutes.

I feel that the faux documentary style employed in The Devil Inside is a way for director William Brent Bell to make his film look as shabby as possible. The format is only useful in a couple of scenes when the camera blurs and starts up again sometime later however overall it is just a way for the main characters to criticise Mike for not getting involved more during the exorcisms. I think Bell was trying for big shocks during the main two exorcism scenes but by the time you've seen the first one you really know what to expect going on. The Exorcist seemed to perfect the voice of the demon trapped in young Regan, voiced by veteran actress Mercedes McBainbridge, but in The Devil Inside the voice almost comes across as comical mainly because the director believes that all demonic entities should sound like foul-mouthed Brits. I have to say the first five minutes of the film did show promise but once it lapsed into your bog-standard shock horror film there was no stopping the tired clichés coming one after another. The cast of unfamiliar actors didn't do much to make me care about their fate with the relationship between the two priests coming off as almost homoerotic while Gabriella went from likeable to annoying fairly easily. The biggest problem with The Devil Inside is that it really didn't know how to end and it seemed to me like the project just ran out of money so Bell ended it suddenly hoping to provide a shock for the audience however, like myself, I think a lot of them were so bored by that point that they didn't really care.

Verdict: Supplementing cheap horror techniques for real shocks and with a cast who make it hard to care for the characters the only saving grace of the film is that the opening ten minutes are fairly involving add the fact that it's not particularly offensive just bad means that I can justify giving it a score of 2.5/10