The Devil Inside (2012)

[Flack]

Rarely is a movie so terrible that I intentionally spoil it in an attempt to prevent people from either intentionally or accidentally watching it, but that will be the case here.

In The Devil Inside, a young woman named Isabella travels to Rome to visit her mother Maria who, twenty years prior, violently murdered a couple of priests and a nun in what appeared to be a failed exorcism. Maria was found not guilty by reason of insanity and transported halfway across the globe to Italy for mysterious reasons. Isabella has brought an amateur cameraman along with her to film the encounter with her mother and try to discover what really happened that night.

After meeting her mother, Isabella becomes convinced that her mother was not crazy, but legitimately possessed. To learn more she attends a course about possessions, where she meets three young priests who have gone rogue and are performing exorcisms on their own. Isabella and her cameraman are allowed to view one and it goes pretty bad -- the priests seem serious enough, but have more in common with the Three Stooges than Father Karras if you get my drift. Unfortunately for everyone involved, whatever demon that possessed Isabella's mother seems to have tagged along, and before long Isabella is screaming in voices, at least one of the priests is dead, and by the end of the film everybody involved is off to meet their maker in one of the most nonsequitur endings ever.

In the 80s, The Devil Inside would have been one of those horror movies few people saw ones and nobody watched a second time, relegated to the "rarely rented" horror section, its VHS rental box covered in dust. To separate itself from the pack, The Devil Inside (a) included a shocking amount of realistic gore; and (b) filmed it as a "found footage" film. The Devil Inside is literally The Blair Witch meets The Exorcist, but lacking everything that made those films good.

I watched this film because it appeared on a list of the most profitable films released over the past 20 years, with a budget of $1m and a box office return of $101m. Bloody disgusting, it more ways than one.

If you liked The Exorcist and/or the Blair Witch, go watch those films again and skip this one.

[AArdvark]

I would like to see a Three Stooges short involving an exorcism, that would be funny as hell!

Curly Woo-wooing around while Moe the priest gets all tough-guy on the victim, I can see it now.