The Devil’s Reject.
The October Horrorthon has returned, which means I intend to spend the month randomly watching horror movies as they cross my path, and probably getting around to reviewing some of them. The movie I’m reviewing today crossed my path inside a RedBox machine. I vaguely remember seeing commercials for it and thought it was a horror movie, so I picked it up. Turns out it was a horror movie, but was it worth picking up? Find out in my review for Devil’s Due, written by Lindsay Devlin, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Oplin and Tyler Gillett, and starring Zach Gilford, Allison Miller, Sam Anderson, Aimee Carrero, Vanessa Ray, Michael Papajohn (wait … that’s a name?), Griff Furst, Robert Aberdeen, and Sammy Pizzahut (I’m guessing).
Zach (Zach Gilford) and Samantha McCall (Allison Miller) are a newly married couple that go to the Dominican Republic on their honeymoon. And you know what happens when people go to the Dominican Republic? That’s right! They get drugged and Samantha gets a demon baby put inside her. Same thing that happens to everyone that travels to the Dominican Republic. I really don’t know why people keep going there… Anyway, weird things start happening to Samantha because there’s a demon baby in her or whatever. Blah blah blah Rosemary’s Baby.
My description is perhaps a bit misleading. It makes it seem as though I hated this movie. That’s not really the case. I mean, I really remember liking this movie when it was called Rosemary’s Baby. This version just wasn’t as good as that one. I assume someone watched Rosemary’s Baby and said, “What if this happened today? And was all found footage? People love (and are not at all tired of) those movies!” I personally still see potential value in the found footage style. It works sometimes. It wasn’t too bad in this movie, but I really did start to realize that the beginnings can be super awkward and boring as you get to watch their awkward moments from their boring lives missed in with a sweaty nonsense explanation for why this guy thinks every moment of their lives should be recorded. “My dad recorded everything so I figure I should compile 70,000 hours of uncut footage of boring stuff for our child to be forced to watch eventually.” And then I saw the scene where the lady is eating raw meat and assembling a creepy looking baby stroller and I realized this was Rosemary’s Baby. That makes sense; Rosemary’s Baby was a great movie. The problem is that the found footage thing you went for takes all the mystery out of it. In Rosemary’s Baby there was a chance she imagine the whole devil rape thing. In this movie we watched it happen on a video camera.
I would say the look of the movie is pretty effective. The blood looks good, the effects look good and the CG stuff works well. …That is all.
There were actors in this movie as well, but I can’t say that I had many thoughts about them. Zach Gilford was just a dude. Nothing particularly special about him one way or another. Allison Miller worked well. She was pretty likeable and pulled off the creepy stuff pretty well. The only problem I had was with Robert Aberdeen as the second doctor. The delivery of his lines was so obvious that he might as well have been saying, “Your other doctor won’t be back because the cult I’m with killed her so that we could watch your demon baby. It’s hard to explain … have you seen Rosemary’s Baby? It’s like that.”
The Devil’s Due is not a bad movie. The acting is mostly good, it never really got boring (nor did it come close to being scary), and the story was fairly decent. It just happens that all of those things were much better when this movie was Rosemary’s Baby. So I guess my recommendation for Devil’s Due is that you should definitely watch Rosemary’s Baby. Devil’s Due gets “Devil’s Due-not” out of “Get it?!?!”
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