RJC-99

There's enough to like in this genre mishmash. It's a noir in most respects, the plot mainly skulking around nighttime Chicago with a disillusioned cop (Gig Young) who's tempted to burn down his married life and light out for California. The anodyne Young is merely OK here. The supporting cast (especially the reliably oily Edward Arnold and the edgy William Talman) livens things up. The location shooting is often terrific, making you wish the production had just ditched much of its dull soundstage material and run around those dark, lonely Chicago streets where, we learn, the alleys are home to dice games and Caesarean sections.

Weirdly, the script by the well-traveled Steve Fisher who once adapted Raymond Chandler works at cross purposes. He's glued a Capraesque fantasy redemption tale onto the grittiness, replete with a guardian angel, that causes things to bog down whenever the body count is getting promising. He also can't resist some Tennessee Williams pastiche about a tormented ex-actor (Wally Cassell). This subplot, sappy though it is, has a grotesque allure. But none of this cuteness and wallowing keeps faith with the story.

What has aged badly are the characterizations. Young's mopey cop is suffering from a fairly unusual problem in 1953: his wife makes too much money. Sapping his will to carry on protecting the city that never sleeps, income envy has driven him into the arms of a cabaret floozy, a most hardboiled Mala Powers, here milking her bad girl tropes like a bottomless udder. Meanwhile, as bodies are dropping all around, the cop's wife is ready to go back to homemaking if it will restore domestic bliss. See what happens in the city that never bakes?

It wasn't a big transition from this stuff to the 1970s TV shows (Starsky and Hutch, Fantasy Island) that closed out the writer and director's careers.

The suspicion you feel watching M. Night Shyamalan movies is that his heart just isn't in horror. The jumps and scares are there, but that's to fill seats. What really makes his pulse skip is the Gumpian possibility of sweet, orderly redemption. This isn't an isolated case of Spielbergitis. Nearly all the biggest grossing movie product of our time treats horror as if the supernatural or grotesquely human were just mosquitos getting in the way of life's picnic. Millennial horror is the setting for chaste teen romance ("Twilight"), coming-of-age triumphs over nasty adulting ("The Hunger Games") and hymns to family unity and girl power ("A Quiet Place"). The myths that people pay the most to hear in the 21st century are flattering selfies.

M. didn't write Devil, but it's his storytelling DNA through and through. I was amused by the hallucination of Philly as a shiny, clean American city -- one where, as the opening credits tell us, normal life is about to be turned upside down. There, for one awful day in paradise, a spiffy corporate skyscraper populated with employees straight out of the Andy Griffith Show just can't catch a break. If only there was a noble Philly police detective with a strong whiff of Springsteen about him to ride to the rescue! And a security guard whose mama told him quaint folk tales that track with the plot, so the movie can forego any boring metaphysical sleuthing! Funny you asked...

The devil used to have a good agent, if the evidence of classics like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist is anything to go by. Even into the late 80s, a smart noir tale like Angel Heart gave the devil his due. Then something happened in the culture; they dressed the devil in Prada, and it was all over. It is all over. Shyamalan's Devil is a remix of The Towering Inferno with the ensemble bickering of Hitch's Lifeboat and big lashings of Saw. The goofy mixture makes you feel you're watching the WWII era, the big budget disaster spectacles of the 70s and the teen torture sleaze of the 00s all at once. I'll say this for it: it's impressive how much cliche you can cram into one elevator.

If you like Asian horror, you probably aren't looking for the equivalent of Abbott & Costello Meet The Spooky Chick With Long Hair. That's close to what Hong-jin Na has done with his half-parody, half-serious take on his supernatural material. He's more serious than not, but he's also fatally hung his tale on a cop protagonist who's a pudgy bumbling wimp. We're meant to see multiplying local horrors as the forge that helps officer Jong-goo man up, if not in the eyes of his bored wife then at least to save his cutie pie kid. He's determined to scream and run for it like a Korean Lou Costello.

This prefab spook house is filled with slapstick, zombies, ghosts, plagues, exorcisms and gore, but Na's predictable and it's always obvious where he's going next. He has an OK eye, a plodder's pacing and a manga's paint-by-number characters. His action sequences typically involve the same repeated pratfalls -- he's no Yeon Sang-ho! He does, however, pull out all the stops for a berserk tongue-in-cheek shamanic ritual that's the only memorable sequence in the film.