WTF Blogosphere? A Dissenting Opinion on The Devil Inside

When there's a movie I really want to see, I avoid reading reviews like the Bubonic. I refuse to taint my experience with any expectations other than the ones I've formed myself based on the trailer, the cast, and the filmmakers. On Saturday night, I shelled out my $8.50 to see The Devil Inside not expecting much. When I walked out of the theatre a few hours later, my stomach was in knots, I felt the beginnings of a panic attack, and a maniacal grin was splitting my head practically in two. In other words, I was peaking on a good horror movie buzz.

Imagine my surprise, shortly after composing my gushing love letter of a review for The Devil Inside, to discover that pretty much every other human being was matched in a lockstep of hatred and disdain for the film. And it wasn't just the uppity, holier-than-thou film critics. It was damn near every other horror blogger I read. WTF blogosphere?

Thing is, reading through a stack of bile-spewing reviews, I found myself agreeing with much of what they said was wrong with the movie. The difference was, I figured "well, this and this could have been better, but the good parts more than made up for it" while everyone else was like "this and this totally ruined the movie." So, for the record, yes, the ending was extremely abrupt, anticlimactic, and disappointing. But it wasn't at all out of line in terms of the story. And okay, ending with a URL was tasteless and gimmicky. I can't argue with that. But after my initial disappointment faded and I rewound the film in my head, I was really kind of blown away.
Here's what I liked about The Devil Inside:

The Possessed - The actresses who played Maria Rossi and Rosa, the two main possessed women in the film, were incredible. The erattic sedated-to-manic behavior of Maria is unnerving, and when her daughter enters the room with her, it creates this trip-wire tension and a real sense of danger. I was watching with clenched fists, just waiting to see what kind of violently crazy shit she'd pull.

The Exorcism Scenes - People complained that everything in the exorcism scenes was stolen from other movies, The Exorcist in particular. But couldn't you say the same about every other exorcism movie ever made? That's the problem with film genres that were spawned by a single movie. You can't watch a zombie film without defining it in terms of Night of the Living Dead. The Exorcist created the conventions for the exorcism film, and every film within the genre will be measured by how it conforms to or departs from those conventions. That said, The Devil Inside is a very conventional exorcism film, using the well-established elements of bodily contortions, levitation, distorted voices, and obscenity-packed blaspheming. So yeah, you're not seeing anything new, but you're seeing it in a new way, and for the most part, better than it's been done before.

The Effects - Let's be honest, as much as Linda Blair's 180 degree head-rotation scared us all pissless back in the day, it looks pretty hokey in 2012. But the effects in The Devil Inside are seamless and utterly convincing. While some had to be computer enhanced (though damned if I could tell which ones they were), one of the film's main assets was human-special effect Bonnie Morgan. And sure, she got hired because she can twist her body into unbelievable knots, but the girl can really act too. While critics dog-piled on the film's faux-documentary style as what was wrong with the movie, I thought it was essential to its success. There's something incredibly scary about putting convincing special effects into a lo-fi digital video.

I think the main problem is that people are just burned out on found footage, shaky camera fare. I'm convinced that if this movie had come out 5 years ago, it would have been hailed as a genre classic. As it is, a lot of people reported the movie wasn't the least bit scary. And if you go into a movie with an attitude like, "Okay motherfucker, scare me. I dare you," almost nothing will. You see, there's a correct way to watch a horror film, and it involves meeting the movie halfway. For me, I do my damnedest to place myself in the vulnerable position of the protagonists, leaving myself open to being scared. I crave the fear, the tension. And I want to like every movie I watch, and when I don't, it's not for lack of trying on my part.

In this respect, The Devil Inside had me at Hello. When I was a kid, The Exorcist really did a number on me, and movies about demonic possession have a pre-burrowed route to getting under my skin. But that's the point - no matter how much critics pretend that movies can be evaluated objectively, each individual's movie experience is deeply personal and depends on all kinds of factors from your personal history to who you saw it with to what your mood was like the day you saw it. So, maybe The Devil Inside wasn't as great as I thought. Maybe I was simply excited to have two child-free hours to engage in my favorite pasttime. Who knows? But I had a great time with it. Likewise, maybe it wasn't as bad as the critics and bloggers would have you believe. Don't trust them. Don't trust me. Just try to watch the movie without expectations.

Revisiting Old Friends: Re-viewing A Nightmare on Elm Street Parts 3 & 4

Hey spelunkers,

Sorry I've been away from the cave for so long. I have no excuse. I'm just an asshole.

I have been writing, however. For those who don't know, this is Eighties month over the the venerable The Mike's blog, From Midnight With Love, and I volunteered to write a column for him to post while he's on vacation next week. In it, I shamelessly drool all over The Lost Boys. That should be up on Wednesday, and I'll post a link for you then. In the meantime, I thought I'd continue my personal Eighties revival with a re-viewing on two entries from my favorite horror series from that golden(ish) age: A Nightmare on Elm Street parts 3 & 4.

A little history: After overcoming my intense fear of horror movies by totally falling in love with The Lost Boys, I decided to challenge myself by watching what I imagined to be the most terrifying horror film imaginable (aside from the Exorcist, which at the time was out of the question). My friends and I had been talking about A Nightmare on Elm Street for awhile. None of us had actually seen it, but we had heard things from people who had. We knew the story and had seen Freddy all over the place. Oddly, I can't recall my first viewing of Wes Craven's greatest film, but I do remember its effect on me. While The Lost Boys turned out to be not-so-scary, NOES freaked my shit out. And I liked it! It was the first time that I had experienced the sensation of pleasure at having been scared, and I was hooked.

The next time I went to my local video store's used movie sale, I talked my mom into buying me the first three Elm Street videos, took them into the basement, and reveled in the glory. I thought part 2 was still pretty scary, but not nearly as good as the original, but I thought part 3 was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. Iwatched those three videos on a near daily basis for the next few months. Part 4 hadn't come out yet, but my mom taped a behind-the-scenes special for me that I watched over and over again. I knew practically every scene of the film before I even got to see it. To this day, every time I watch it, I can't help but see the face of effects wizard Screaming Mad George grinning and explaining how he did everything.

Screaming Mad George

Bored yet? Alright, alright. I'll get to the movies (but I can't promise to be any less self-absorbed).

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors

I loved this movie so much as a teenager that I was almost afraid to watch it. Thinking back on it, it always seemed a tad ridiculous, and I'm not going to argue that it isn't, but I'm happy to say that the magic is still there.

First off, the characters are awesome. Patricia Arquette reminded me why I fell in love with her for her fantastic portrayal of the character Kristen, giving all of her scenes an autheticity that is lacking in too many horror movies (especially second sequels). And my two longtime favorites, Taryn and Kincaid, were as appealing as I remembered them.



"In my dreams I'm beautiful, and bad."


The main draw, back in the day, was of course the return of Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon. While Langenkamp's performance isn't flawless by any means, my lifelong crush remains intact. As for John Saxon, why isn't he being cast in every movie that comes out. He's been working, but I haven't seen him since Dario Argento's Master of Horror episode, Pelts, and From Duck Till Dawn before that. Seriously, every second this man is on the screen is a second God doesn't subtract from the span of our lives. However, on this viewing, I was taken with the perfection the is Laurence Fishburne's tough but kind and supercool Max. God actually adds minutes to the span of your life for every second he's on the screen. Elm Street 3 boasts a truly impressive cast. The man played Othello for God's sake.




"Shee-it, That's what keeps people alive."


Throughout the viewing, I was happy to find myself remembering damned near every line and reciting them along with the cast, using their same intonation and all. What I didn't expect was some actual chills during the film. I'll admit that I was only half paying attention, listening more than watching while I reorganized the personal hellhole that is my sons' room, but the movie would catch me off guard and bring back that old feeling of dread. In particular, any scene with Sister Mary Helena (aka Amanda Krueger) was just haunting. She give me the same kind of vibe I get from watching Maria Ouspenskaya in The Wolf Man (coming from me, this is high praise indeed, as Ouspenskaya's is one of my favorite performances in all of horror). The one that really got me is the unofficial group therapy session in which Nancy explains to the kids who Freddy is, and why he is doing what he is doing. I don't know quite what it was, but the combination of the original Elm Street score with the dialogue just did it for me. It reminds me of the scene from the original where Nancy's mother finally admits to her what is going on. "Fred Krueger is dead, because Mommy killed him." Freakin' awesome.




Mother of a son of a hundred maniacs.


I was impressed by the atmosphere of the movie too. The dreamscapes are all drear and decay, and the presence of children reminds you just how sick the character of Freddy really is. This is, of course, the film where the Elm Street series really took the step into fantasy horror and Freddy dispatched his victims in all kinds of creative and ridiculous ways. But somehow it works in this movie. Where things start to fall apart is in Part 4.

A  Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

I'm not going to lie: I still love this movie out of pure nostalgia, and it's a damned sight better than the pure crap of Parts 5 and 6, but if today was the first time I'd ever seen this movie, I'd think it was garbage.

The thing is, Part 4 is a natural extension of Part 3, repeating everything that made the previous film work, and rendering it ridiculous. In Part 3, Freddy takes the teens' individual fears and turns them against them. For example, in Part 3, Taryn is a former junkie who turned to dope to escape her nightmares. After she gets clean, her biggest fear is relapsing and succombing to addiction again. When Freddy shows up, his fingers turn from claws to syringes and he offs her with a heroin overdose. I always loved that. But fast forward to Part 4, and they set up each character to have some preposterous fear or weakness, specifically so Freddy couls exploit it. Case and point: Debbie is repulsed by bugs. So Freddy turns her into a cockroach and squashes her in a roach motel. Dumb.




"Let's get high."


Part 3 was also where the kills got creative. Instead of just using his talons to slash his way through teenagers, Freddy turns into a giant worm and tries to swallow them, he grows out of a television set and smashes the aspiring tv star's head into the set, and slashes the puppet-maker's arms and legs, and pulls the tendons out to manipulate him like a puppet. In that last case, the effect is gruesome and honestly pretty scary. Fast forward to Part 4, and you've got Freddy kung fu fighting, turning people into bugs, literally sucking the life out of an athsmatic girl after grabbing her face with some weird robo-claw, and eating meatballs off a pizza that are actually human heads. Honestly, writing that down just now, it doesn't seem like there's much of a difference. I guess it's the tone of each film that makes them different in my mind. Renny Harlin's entry into the series just seems so slick and Hollywood, while part three retains a sense of grimy, low-budget, ugliness.




"Rick, you little meatball."


The atmosphere in part 3 is fantastic. Creepy, dimly-lit old houses and labyrinthian boiler rooms seem firmly in Freddy's territory. Whereas Part 4 has killings occurring in brightly-lit classrooms, serene asian-stlye dojos, and one in full sunlight on the beach. Freddy has to wear sunglasses. Fucking sunglasses!




Fucking Sunglasses!


Then there's the question of what each film adds to the Freddy mythos. Part 3's Amanda Krueger/son of a hundred maniacs angle adds real depth to Freddy's backstory, and is revisited again in subsequent films. But Part 4's nonsense about the Dream Master and guardians of the gates of dreams was just plain ill-conceived. That said, I had a blast watching it. I liked most of the characters, and I knew all the dumb shit in advance. Guilty pleasure? Absolutely.

Only time will tell if I can bring myself to rewatch Parts 5 and 6, which I hated even as a teenager (yet I own anyway. It's the completeist in me). Perhaps I'll just skip to New Nightmare and Freddy vs. Jason. That or watch something from this century.

Sleepaway Camp: Where have you been all my life?

It's damned nigh impossible for me to fathom that I could have been a full-fledged horror fanatic in the 1980s, yet somehow managed to miss Sleepaway Camp. But I suppose it's for the best. Sleepaway Camp is a film best experienced in maturity. Had I watched it in my youth, my reaction would have been:

(Dismissively) "That was fucking stupid."

Whereas, when I watched it recently, my reaction was:

(With boundless enthusiasm) "That was fucking stupid!"

Sleepaway Camp is a film best enjoyed with a roomful of noisy, drunken friends, but is so over-the-top ridiculous that you can watch it solo and have a blast, provided you act as your own noisy, drunken friend.
In fact, you won't be able to help it. Even without access to alcohol, Sleepaway Camp is so intoxicatingly dumb that you'll feel like you've downed a sixer of PBR (the downside is that even if you're drinking good beer, you'll still feel like you've downed a sixer of PBR).

Sleepaway Camp is a bad horror film that is bad in all the right ways, so it becomes great. All the performances are amateurish and grotesquely over-acted, but you can tell everyone is completely giving it their all, which renders it charming.




Young actress totally going for it.

 The film begins with our heroes, cousins Angela and Ricky, enjoying a day on the lake with their loving father/uncle. But they haven't accounted for the deadly presence of teenagers driving speedboats. The minute the strapping young captain turns the wheel over to a girl, the vessel transforms into a deadly projectile headed straight for the happy family. The father/uncle is killed while the young water-skier pictured above gives the performance of her life.

Fast forward a few years and Angela and Ricky are teenagers headed to summer camp. Ricky's mother has become completely unhinged by her husband's death, as evidenced by her strange habit of commenting on her own statements and, more tellingly, her outfit.

Once at camp, we learn that Angela doesn't speak, due to acute quietness, which makes her an instant target for the mean girls clique, consisting of Ricky's busty last-summer-girlfriend and Meg (M-E-G) the bitchy camp counsellor. When Angela won't eat, a kindly counsellor takes her back to the kitchen to see if there is some food she likes better, and introduces her to the pedophile head chef, who promptly takes her into the pantry to molest her. Luckily, Ricky intervenes just in time. Mysteriously, some time later as pedochef is throwing corn into the world's biggest stockpot, someone pulls the chair out from under him, sending the pedophile and the stockpot tumbling to the floor and resulting in some nasty burns. Since, Ricky and Angela were the only two characters to have witnessed pedochef's transgressions, 20 minutes into the movie, the killer's identity is narrowed down to two suspects.

"I got something you'll like real good."



You play with chicken, you get fried.

 The surprising thing about Sleepaway Camp is that it crept up on me, and dumb as it is, before I knew it, I was emotionally invested in the characters. I pitied poor, silent Angela for the abuses piled on her, and found myself ridiculously happy when Ricky's friend, Paul gets her to finally speak.



Awww, ain't they cute?

The rest of the film follows a predictable pattern. Campers taunt and abuse Angela, Ricky freaks out and threatens to rip their heads off, then the killer catches them alone and takes them out. There are no scares whatsoever, and the kills are pretty tame, but somewhat imaginative. What's hilarious is the motivation behind each kill. While revenge for attempted rape makes a certain amount of sense, revenge for a water-ballooning is just plain awesome.



The aftermath of a vicious water-ballooning.

Cuidado - Spoilers anon.

Just when you think Sleepaway Camp is going to be utterly predictable, it flips the script and blows your mind. Don't get me wrong, it's fairly obvious that Angela is the killer, but it turns out to be for an entirely different reason than you'd been led to believe. In an atrociously asinine and offensive turn of events, it is revealed that is wasn't her uncle's death that warped young Angela's mind, but rather than her aunt was transgendered man who forced her young nephew to live as a girl. The final shot of the film, in which Angela's true sex (i.e. her wee-wee) is revealed is truly astonishing. Not only does she go from a seemingly normal, if painfully shy, teen girl to a raging psychotic cradling Paul's severed head, she also apparently turns into Sasquatch, if her unearthly growling sounds are any indication. The icing on the cake is the final line of the film when one of the counsellors says in disbelief, "How can it be? She's a boy!" Yeah, never mind Paul's severed head dropping into the sand and the fact that she's channelling Bigfoot while wielding a knife. For God's sake, she's got a penis!

Had the final scene not caused me to laugh convulsively for a solid half-hour, I might have been highly offended at the completely ignorant and hateful depiction of transgendered people. Were I a member of the LGBT community, the homophobic twist ending would have likely ruined the entire film for me. As it was, the offensiveness only added to Sleepaway Camp's schlocky charm. I definitely recommend this film to everyone with a highly-refined taste for terrible movies.