Tuesday, April 10, 2012

To Rome With Love Trailer



The trailer for Woody Allen's next film, To Rome With Love. The previous titles of the movie were The Bop Decameron and Nero Fiddled. I had no idea what any of those meant, but To Rome With Love sounds great to me. It looks promising and it has a great cast, but that's not always a good thing. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger had an excellent cast, but everyone knows how that turned out. It probably won't be as popular as Midnight in Paris, but it should still be good. To Rome With Love comes out on June 22nd.

Don't Be Lured by The Devil Inside


The Devil Inside is another one of the those faux horror documentaries. It's just like Paranormal Activity and The Last Exorcism, except those movies are interesting. The film follows a young woman named Isabella (Fermanda Andrade) who is trying to help her possessed mother (Susan Crowley). In 1989 her mother slaughtered three people performing an exorcism on her, and she is now in an asylum in Rome, Italy. The Catholic Church is unwilling to help her mother so Isabella finds two renegade Priests (Simonquarterman, Evan Helmuth) who try to save her mother. All while being filmed by a documentarian (Iount Grama).

This movie recycles the plot of all of the other movies based on exorcisms, and it fails miserably. Thanks to the bland script and flat characters, the movie made me feel nothing for the plight of the main characters. Since this is a horror movie entirely made up of found-footage it means that there is plenty of shaky camera footage throughout the whole film. I do not like this technique and I never will. The technique is intriguing at first, but after so many horror films using shaky camerawork it gets old fast.

However, I do mildly commend the directors, William Brent Bell and Joaquin Perea, for the exorcism scenes. During these scenes there is a haunting vibe from the women screaming in agonizing pain as the devil is raging through their body trying to take it over. At times it can be tortuous to watch. Seeing the possessed victims bend like contortionists is always creepy, but these moments are too far in between to keep your attention. Thanks to the script from Bell and Matthew Peterman, this incoherent film is filled with poor acting and banal dialogue. Basically, we have seen everything else before and there are much better horror films out there. Plus this film has one of the worst endings I have ever seen in a horror movie. There is so much build up in the film and it just suddenly ends. I'm being dead serious. The film just ends without a climax or a resolution. Now that's what I call storytelling.

Someday I hope these types of found-footage movies will be extinct, but I don't think that's happening anytime soon.

The Devil Inside - 1/4