This past weekend’s break-out horror movie is The Devil Inside. The movie focuses on a 1989 incident in which a woman by the name of Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley) calls 911 and confesses to murdering three people. 20 years later, her daughter Isabella (Fernanda Andrade) wants to find out what happened on that night, and why her mother was taken to Italy to a hospital for the criminally insane. She discovers that the hospital is part of the Catholic Church and that this facility is a place where people are taken to determine if they are either demonically possessed or just mentally insane.
Isabella travels to Italy and meets up with two exorcist priest (Simon Quarterman, and Evan Helmuth) who use unconventional ways of combining religion and science to determine if a person has been possessed by demons. Once they start to do tests on her mother they learn that she is not just possessed by one demon, but she is in fact possessed by four powerful demons that are no longer content with just staying within Maria.
Now first off, let me just say that this film is the Blair Witch of demonic possessions. It is filmed like a documentary to give the effect that all of these events actually happened in real life and on location. Of course we know this is not the case, because they’re all actors. Aside from that, the movie is pretty good. It’s very creepy and moves at a fast pace. It’s only an hour and 23 minutes long, so it doesn’t last long enough to get boring. The effects are also well done, especially with the body contortions from the possessed victims. There aren’t a lot of exorcism movies where the demons jump into other people, so that aspect of the film was also appealing. The film also takes an inside look into the workings of the Catholic Church and how they treat exorcisms.
In the film, it makes you believe that the catholic religion keeps a lot of secrets about the subject locked up. What I didn’t like about this film was just as it was getting good; it comes to an abrupt end. As you may remember The Blair Witch Project did the same thing back in 1999. Also like the Blair Witch Project, this was made on a really cheap budget of only $1 million, but has more than recouped that in it’s opening weekend, raking in over $33 million.
I have to admit it was one of the better exorcism movies to come out in a while. I gave this film 2 ½ demons out of 4. It could have ended better, but the ride up until then was pretty good. Like I stated earlier, the film runs 1 hour and 23 minutes. It’s rated R for disturbing violent content and grisly images, and for language including some sexual references. The movie was written by Brent Bell and Matthew Peterman. It was directed by Brent Bell. It was produced by Prototype Productions, and distributed by Paramount Insurge.
Some of us have demons we just can’t keep inside. – Ezo
Next movie review: TBD
