The Devil Inside

An increasingly unwatchable found-footage horror flick, The Devil Inside follows Fernanda Andrade’s Isabella as she embarks on a quest to determine why her mother, who may or may not have been possessed by an evil demon, murdered three people 20 years earlier – with Isabella’s investigation eventually leading her to an exorcism school in Rome. Filmmaker William Brent Bell, working from a script written with Matthew Peterman, admittedly does a decent job of initially drawing the viewer into the mercifully-brief proceedings, as The Devil Inside kicks off with a creepy opening stretch that holds a fair amount of promise and establishes a reasonably ominous vibe – with the picture, past that point, seguing into a spinning-its-wheels midsection that alienates the viewer to a progressively palpable extent. It doesn’t help, certainly, that Bell lingers excessively on Isabella’s tedious research into exorcisms and her mother’s history, and there’s little doubt, as well, that the been-there-done-that feel of the movie’s few exorcisms only heightens its often interminable atmosphere. By the time the entirely anti-climactic and shockingly abrupt conclusion rolls around, The Devil Inside has unquestionably lived up to its place as one of the most offensive and flat-out inept entries within the found-footage genre.

* out of ****