Review: The Devil Inside

PLOT: The daughter of a woman who killed three people while in the midst of having a demon exorcised from her body, travels to Vatican City, where she hooks up with two rogue priests who perform unsanctioned exorcisms. Naturally, she films the whole thing.

REVIEW: Well folks, only six days into 2012, I can safely say that I’ve seen the movie that’s all be guaranteed to end up number one with a bullet on my “worst of 2012” list when I write it next December. If you’ve read my reviews of films like PARANORMAL ACTIVITY or THE LAST EXORCISM, you’ll likely assume that I have a thing against “found footage” movies. For the most part, yes- I hate this technique, but there have been some great films made this way, including the REC films. While I pretty much figured that the first weekend of January release date meant that THE DEVIL INSIDE wasn’t much of a film, at worst I was expecting a PARANORMAL ACTIVITY ripoff. What I got was much, MUCH worse.

I’m not exaggerating when I say THE DEVIL INSIDE is among the worst films I’ve ever reviewed for JoBlo.com. The only two that come close to it’s level of inanity are maybe PASSION PLAY, and TWIXT. Certainly THE DEVIL INSIDE is the first time I ever found myself in a theatre where an audience, that, mind you, had seen the film for free, were so enraged when it was over that everyone in the theatre started booing and throwing things at the screen once the credits rolled. Truly, this is a bad film.

Even if you go in just wanting to see some cool exorcisms, you likely won’t get much from this that you haven’t seen in other, far better films. Even something I hated like THE LAST EXORCISM seems like the original, classic THE EXORCIST in comparison to this piece of crap. The two exorcisms are total retreads, with seemingly whole exchanges being ripped of from the William Friedkin classic (or close enough). The acting is unfathomably bad, and like something out of an Ed Wood movie. There’s a hilarious scene where one of the actors, playing a priest, is supposed to be having a cigarette, but seems so uncomfortable holding in his hands that the audience started to snicker, especially when he puts it out without ever even taking a drag. It looks like this actor had never held a cigarette in his life, with it only being shoehorned into the scene because the director probably thought it looked cool.

The level of stupidity on display from our main characters here is awful, and Vatican City is portrayed as the kind of place where a priest can almost drown a baby, or woman could murder someone in a hospital, without ever having to worry about the cops. And when they do show up, they’ll be so laughably incompetent that they seem like they walked out of a Keystone Kops short from the twenties.

Apparently, THE DEVIL INSIDE is just the first of what threatens to be a series of low-budget films to come from Paramount’s new “Insurge” division, which is devoted to finding the next PARANORMAL ACTIVITY style cash-cow. Yeah, this ain’t it folks. I’m actually amazed/horrified that Paramount would stoop so low as to attach their logo to something as amateurish as this, as this strikes me as a film that should have been deemed unreleasable. As much as I didn’t like the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY films, I can see why people enjoy them, and at their absolute worst, they’re about 1000x better than this. This is truly a film to avoid at all costs, and in fact should be boycotted by anyone who finds it absurd that a studio would have the gall to release something so amateurish on 2000 screens, and then charge people admission to see it. This gets a big, fat zero in my books.