Review of The Devil Inside (2012) by The D — 03 Oct 2013

(2/10).

Why do terrible horror movies always seem to open on the first weekend of every year? In 2009, we had The Unborn. In 2010 we had Daybreakers. In 2011, we had Season of the Witch. Continuing this trend in 2012 is one of the laziest horror movies of recent years. I am of course talking about the found-footage horror movie The Devil Inside.

The Devil Inside takes itself very seriously and it keeps insisting that it's a true story and even dedicated a website to it. The true story gimmick is totally unconvincing due to the laziness of the filmmakers. They did absolutely no research while making this film even though they keep insisting that it's true. One could easily disprove this story completely by using Google for about 10 seconds. I don't have a problem with found-footage movies like this to use the true story gimmick, but this is the only one I have ever seen that keeps driving it into your brain until you accept it. Paranormal Activity uses the same gimmick, but at least they have fun with it and don't expect you to fully believe it.

Other than that, the movie plods along at a glacial pace until it finally picks up in the final scenes only to come to the worst film ending I have ever seen. None of the characters have any depth to get us interested in the story, most of it is attempting to be scary and unsettling, but instead comes across as hilarious and laughable.

When watching an exorcism movie, you expect to see contorting limbs and other freaky exorcism stuff. You don't really get that until the second half of the film, but it's a relief when you do because there's a genuinely cool exorcism scene near the end of the movie that takes place in a basement. After this scene, the movie finally appears to have some life to it. It continues on like this for another 15 minutes or so until the worst ending of all time. I'm not exaggerating when I say that The Devil Inside has the worst ending I have ever seen in a film ever. I was actually enraged at the filmmakers for doing what they did and I feel sorry for the people who paid money to go see this film in the cinema. I can only imagine what paying movie-goers must have thought when they were cheated by that ending. I watched it on Netflix and I felt cheated.

The only explanation I can think of for having an ending like this is that they ran out of money and weren't able to shoot anymore footage. They pull the old "Oops! The tape ran out of film!" trick. It ends literally out of nowhere and a black screen appears telling you to go a stupid website to find out more about what happened. This is the LAZIEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN. You're too lazy to film an ending so you tell everybody to go on a website and look up the ending on the internet? Shame on you filmmakers, shame on you.