The Devil Inside (2012)
Directed by William Brent Bell
Written by William Brent Bell, Matthew Peterman
Starring Fernanda Andrade, Simon Quarterman, Evan Helmuth, Suzan Crowley
Release Date January 6th, 2012
Published January 6th, 2012
The Devil Inside is a 78 minute advertisement for a website. There’s a chance I should have said ‘spoiler alert’ before telling you that but frankly this movie does not deserve my discretion. The Devil Inside is a con job. This is a fraud of a movie that leads audiences to the singularly most unsatisfying ending to a movie I’ve seen in my many years as a movie critic.The film ends with a massive car wreck and an invitation to see how it turned out on the film’s website. Spoiler Alert.
The Devil Inside begins as a rip off of The Last Exorcism, a rare really great found footage horror film from 2010, as we get a fake documentary about exorcism told at first from a skeptical perspective. Quickly however, the skepticism gives way to the cliched bone crunching, head-spinning, potty mouthed demon spectacle that the exorcism genre calls for. There is, after all, no such thing as a polite and well-mannered or thoughtful demon.
Relative unknown actress Fernanda Andrade stars in The Devil Inside as Isabella Rossi, the daughter of a killer. Isabella’s mother, Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley), murdered three members of her church as they were performing an exorcism… on her. Through some mysterious machinations of the church Maria ends up transferred to a hospital in Rome under the treatment of Vatican doctors.
It’s an interesting idea and for a short time director William Brent Bell even manages to keep you engaged. The cracks however in this deeply flawed film, begin to show through after Isabella and her documentary making pal Michael (Ionut Grama) have traveled to Italy and hooked up with a pair of priests, Ben (Simon Quarterman) and David (Evan Helmuth), who run an illegal side business as exorcists for hire.
Once the exorcists take a shot at saving Isabella’s mother, the movie careens downhill toward its controversial ending. The ending of The Devil Inside left the audience I was with seething with anger and demanding their money back after the screening. There were boos, people throwing trash, and some derisive laughter at the expense of the movie. Not that the filmmakers would care, they’d already received their paychecks for this nonsense.
There is nothing even the least bit redeeming about The Devil Inside. The film is a flimsy con-job; it’s two thirds of a movie sold for the full price of a ticket. The ending invites audiences to visit a website to find out more about Isabella Rossi. I won’t publicize the website here as it is merely an extension of the filmmakers’ failure to come up with an ending. Even if the ending were satisfying, the gimmick of not having an ending has already soured any goodwill the movie might have had. Plus, it wasn’t very good for the first two acts, the ending was not going to save The Devil Inside from ignominy.
Instead of an ending we get a novelty; a failing attempt to bridge the gap between the movie screen and the internet. This was an idea that was destined to fail and fail miserably. Admittedly, I can’t say how many people followed up and went to the website following the movie. But, I have a hard time imagining that many did. The reaction from the crowd that I witnessed the night that The Devil Inside debuted was not excitement about a new way to merge movies and the internet. This was an angry mob seething with resentment and a rueful desire for some form of revenge.
