The Curator of Schlock #228 by Jeff Shuster

The Devil Inside

This might be the worst movie of the decade.

Hello patrons of my blog. Welcome back to another riveting collection of my personal musings of the cinema of our times. Yes, I continue to marvel at this decade of the 2010s and the movies it has wrought. I’m not going to turn in the report card just yet. Hell, we’re not even halfway through the year. Speaking of hell, Satan Month returns to The Museum of Schlock. Yes, it seems that Hollywood still regularly produces movies centered on the evil one even into this decade. Tonight’s film is 2012’s The Devil Inside from director William Brent Bell.

The Devil Inside cost about 1 million to make and grossed about 101.8 million at the box office. This was back during the first weekend of January in 2012. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol had taken the lead the weekend prior.

I think that was the first time Brad Bird had directed a live action movie and the results were above par. I thoroughly enjoyed that theater-going experience, thinking it was the next best thing to seeing a Bond movie at Christmastime, a tradition that had been stymied due to MGM’s bankruptcy and no one wanting to buy them out. Ghost Protocol was just a grand piece of escapism. Sometimes you just need to see Tom Cruise climbing the outside of the Burj Khalifa, especially during the holidays. I’m looking forward to seeing Mission Impossible: Fallout this summer as well Brad Bird’s own follow-up to The Incredibles.

Why am I bringing up Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol? Maybe it’s because I can’t figure how it was unseated by the found footage horror film, The Devil Inside. I did not go to see this in the theater. It was streaming on Amazon Prime. I knew about The Devil Inside, not necessarily avoiding it, but wary of its reputation. Maligned by audiences and critics, its box office quickly dropped off its second weekend. There’s a good reason for this.

The movie is a festering turd.

I don’t like watching bad movies, contrary to what many of you may think. What we exhibit her at the Museum of Schlock are diamonds in the rough, cinematic treasures that while a little rough around the edges, still have merit, still bring a smile to my face. But cheap, shot-on-video, found-footage knockoffs of The Exorcist are not my idea of a good time. It’s not that I can’t enjoy a good Exorcist knockoff. Beyond the Door comes to mind.

The Devil Inside looks cheap and dumb.

Unfocused shots. Zooming in and out. A professional documentarian would know better, as would most amateur documentarians.

The story revolves around two rogue priests from the Vatican doing illegal exorcisms . They try to help an American woman named Isabella Rossi whose mother is in a Catholic mental asylum in Rome, Italy. Her mother savagely murdered three members of the clergy twenty years earlier under the influence of demonic possession, but the Vatican will not offer a ruling about the mother’s spiritual state.

Enter the rogue priests.

One of them commits suicide.

The devil possesses Isabella.

The surviving rogue priest doesn’t have the right stuff when it comes to performing exorcisms.

The priest, the documentarian, and demonically possessed Isabella die in a car accident.

Fade to black.

No music.

Sometimes I hate this job.