• Movies

by Dr Chris on 01.17.12

Demonic possession has become the new thing in Hollywood. With Paranormal Activity, The Rite, The Last Exorcism, etc. all more or less doing business at the box office, it's not hard to see why. Now the first movie of the New Year is along those lines as well. The Devil Inside is a documentary/found footage movie. In 1989, 911 gets a call from the home of Maria Rossi after she kills three people. 20 years later, a group of people take some exorcism classes in Vatican City, Italy. One of these students, Isabella Rossi, is trying to find out what happened to her mother 20 years ago and why was she flown half way around the world and locked up in a crazy house in Italy and not America.

Movies like this and Paranormal Activity learned from the mistakes of the past and keep the camera nice and steady - which is great considering that it can get real shaky and annoying at times. However I suppose it's to their collective credit that The Devil Inside looks like it was assembled, for the most part, by amateurs. That was evidently their intention. It does have its share of scares, and for the young people I was watching it with they did jump a lot and were generally scared by some of the things they saw on screen. It was like Paranormal Activity; one minute you see something and the next it’s moved or become something more terror inducing.

The Devil Inside is directed by William Brent Bell, who also cowrote the movie with Matthew Peterman. William directed the almost there but not quite able to fill a major plot hole of a film Stay Alive back in 2006. His performance for directing has gotten somewhat better as there are no plot holes in this film but, it’s not a great film either. If you like Paranormal Activity 1, 2 or 3 you might enjoy The Devil Inside. Otherwise you might need an exorcist yourself to purge this film from your memory.