Devil's Due

1st watched 1/18/2014 – 4 out of 10(Dir:Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillet): Eerie story about a wife's possession by the Devil to attempt to produce one of his own thru her. The movie is filmed entirely in first person similar to the Blair Witch Project but more like Cloverfield --- but unfortunately the point of view changes which makes it kind of confusing. It starts as a newlywed couple vacation on their honeymoon in the Dominican Republic. Nothing is really revealed abnormal about the couple except that the wife is a foster child with a supposed past hard life. They are having a typical good time, but then decide to take a detour to an underground party after being coaxed by a local taxi driver. After they get a little too toasted we see a brief glimpse of some footage at a strange religious ceremony, but then are taken back to footage of them arriving from their vacation back into their new home. We find out later that ceremony has much to do about what happens next. The wife becomes pregnant despite being on the pill, and immediately starts suspecting that there are problems with the baby. She then starts doing strange things like eating raw meat at a grocery store(despite being a vegetarian), causing preachers to cough up blood, and taking night walks into the wild to kill deer and munch of their innards…so naturally the husband starts questioning something awry is going on….you think?? The movie is scary at times but because it is so predictable you just wait for the eerie things to happen(and they do). There is eventually a story told here that makes some sense as to why things happened but there are a lot of holes to it as well. I will leave out a lot of the specifics just in case you want to watch this movie about an antichrist possession….i'm not sure why I wanted to watch it myself…I think I was just challenging myself…but overall this is just not that great of a movie, and the creepy feeling only lasted for a short while after the movie was over.

First of all, I am a big fan of the found footage supernatural/horror genre and love watching even the lesser acclaimed films. I am the type of viewer that draws the positives out of a very flawed film and enjoy it. So I expected to enjoy something out of this at the very least.

My god, what a tediously insufferable film this turned out to be.

There is absolutely no innovation or any attempt to try something new. It is so painfully boring.

The concept idea was very promising which is basically a found footage rendition of The Omen or Rosemary's baby. However, this film is so dire at engaging the audience due to the most irritable protagonist I have ever seen so far in a found footage type movie. For more than half of the movie, we are tortured with the sickly saccharine antics of a doting husband on his newly wed wife. There is no natural humour to ease the torment and worse for a film of this type, there were actually no scares until the last act.

As I said, I am the type of film goer that draws the positives and try enjoy that. So are there any? Well, there is a dog that was amusing for 2 seconds but even he looked bored, thereafter. OK, there is a bit more positives. You do get a predictable climax in an attempt to "reward " us for our eternal patience which was efficiently executed but without any unique vision or flair, just the usual creep around corridors and..."boo" oh it was just the dog sort of thing. The actors do perform well but the material they have to work with is revolting.

At the end of the credits there is a piece of text explaining that this film created 200,000 jobs. Well that was nice to know and the only bit that made me feel good knowing that at least it gave a lot of people work but then I wonder if stating that was an indirect apology and their justification to make this dreadfully boring movie?

TO be fair, the film is as polished as it can be for a found footage genre but its all pointless if it fails to engage us in the narrative.

If you haven't seen many horror films or supernatural films such as Paranormal Activity etc, then perhaps you might enjoy this more as long as you can stomach the vomit inducing newly weds for half of the movie.

I give this a 3/10 rating, mostly for the dog that looked fairly convincing in not wanting to be in the movie. Get a new agent doggy, you deserve better.

The orphan Samantha (Allison Miller) gets married with Zach McCall (Zach Gilford) and they travel in honeymoon to Santo Domingo. In their last night in the Dominican Republic, the newlywed couple is invited by a taxi driver to go to a party in the outskirts of Santo Domingo. They drink too much and do not see that Sam is brought to a weird cult. They return to the United States and soon Sam discovers that she is pregnant. Along the pregnancy, Sam changes her behavior and becomes nervous and aggressive. On the night of the delivery, Zach witnesses weird events at home.

"Devil's Due" is a lame and cheap movie that uses the same storyline of "Rosemary's Baby". This rip-off could have the title "How to Destroy the Storyline of a Masterpiece with a Hand-held Camera and an Absurd Plot". Sam and Zach accepting to go to a slum in an unknown country with a stranger are among the greatest stupidities of the cinema industry. The new doctor uses the office of Dr. J. Ludka and no receptionist or nurse notices. The house of Sam and Zach is completely destroyed in a calm neighborhood and no neighbor observes. The use of camera as if it were Zach is nonsense in most of the situations. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "O Herdeiro do Diabo" ("Devil's Due")

This was really deceptive marketing and hype that drew me into this movie. I am very sorry I went. The acting, directing, production design, continuity, editing and of course the story, screen writing and execution were just abysmal. There was nothing of quality in this film. The characters were stupid, the camera work was jarring "handheld reality TV" nonsense and on top of it all, the plot was told in a far superior manner by Roman Polanski in "Rosemary's Baby" forty years ago! It just shows that with some production money, a digital camera and some reality-TV "Blair Witch"/"Paranormal Activity"-type marketing approach, you can sell any kind of garbage to the American public. I urge you not to support this film, or any future endeavours of anyone involved with this project (cast, crew, director or screenwriters)....

"Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming." While on their honeymoon Samantha (Miller) and Zach (Gilford) decide to go out clubbing and end up drinking more then planned and some of their trip is fuzzy. When they return home they are both surprised and excited when they find out Samantha is pregnant. What starts off as something happy begins to change when Samantha begins to act strangely. As I have said many times I try to watch as many movies as I can without seeing the previews first. I did that with this one and was very disappointed when I found out it was another found footage movie. That type of horror movie worked with the Blair Witch Project because it was new and everyone thought that it was real. To a lesser extent it also worked for the first Paranormal Activity because again at that time it was still new. Now that every other horror comes like this the "realism" is lost and just becomes more annoying then anything. Found footage aside there are many other problems with the movie. The first 20 minutes feels like someone forcing you to watch their bad home movies. It never really gets much more exciting then that. On a side note the movie Hell Baby which was a comedic version of this subject was much better then this one. Overall, yet another found footage horror movie that wasn't scary. It's almost time for this genre to stop. I give this a C.