Bedeviled

I never like starting any sort of a review with a negative, but I can't approach reviewing this in any other way. This is not a very good film, in fact it's actually a pretty poor film.

It has some truly interesting ideas, but the realisation is pretty poor. Evil invasion by app sounds great, but sadly it just doesn't work. There's an effort to make it feel old school, it has a vibe of Nightmare on Elm Street about it, plus it has a few references, It and Truth or dare being two, sadly though Bedeviled is not in the same league as either.

Some good visuals, but we don't get them for long enough. Best scene definitely Cody being chased through the car park, that was great. The acting was also an issue, at times various members of the cast were very wooden.

So many wasted opportunities. 4/10

Bedeviled is the latest in a long line of cyber horrors featuring the standard young hot cast as they become besieged by a supernatural force spawning from a mobile phone application.

Now though this hardly sounds like the best of premises it actually works, it's just not handled very well at all.

Shortly in I thought that our antagonist had the potential to be a new much needed horror icon. He looks the part, he sounds the part and his method of killing is interesting and with room for some unique moments.

The writers took the ball and ran with it, sadly they fumbled and dropped it at least half a dozen times en route to the line.

With the right writers and a competent director this could be salvaged and made into a decent franchise, but I won't hold my breath quite yet.

I'm not saying that Bedeviled is bad, it's just not what it could have been.

I gave this one a chance because the trailer made it look like it had a creepy Nightmare on Elm Street vibe (which turned out to be more of an "It" vibe). Overall the film is meh; a movie made by folks who only know life from other C grade films. Cases in point; the group of high school friends don't talk, or act, like high-schoolers (all the females, including the extras in the brief classroom shots, were cast from the "hot girl" casting pool and non of them look younger than early twenties); with two or three brief exceptions these kids practically live in a bubble - none of them have parents, or siblings, or know anyone else at school except each other since they don't interact with anybody or have outside interests and certainly no jobs (they live in super fancy homes yet none of them even have maids, or gardeners in the absence of parents); they know they're being stalked through their phones by an evil app but still continue to go home to their dark, empty houses and stay connected thru their phones. Oh and isn't it lucky that amongst the group there just so happens to be a studly computer genius who can figure everything out for them - possibly even completing the work of a renowned deceased scientist - and yet the evil computer app who knows everything about them doesn't even deal with that threat. If those kind of unbelievable, unrealistic, and totally synthetic behaviors and situations never bother you then you might enjoy this flick. There's one or two decent little sequences (I like the evil teddy bear) and they obviously spent all their budget on some cool effects instead of the necessary re-writes to make the film anything more than barely tolerable. And they saved money by not hiring good actors also. But it seems like all they simply wanted to do was make a movie just like other movies, regardless if those were good or bad.

This flick has a nice plot (not original but fun) and some really gorgeous young actresses (the main reason to watch this).

Sadly there are way more negatives than positives. Sound design is terrible. I really hate the old trick of popping up the volume 1000% when someone screams. Also, this kind of movie needed way way...way more SFX. All you get in this are homemade quality SGI, and quite few at that (The SGI in the final scene are especially bad).

This flick is for a fun night with friends, a few laughs, and watch preferably while playing a board game or something. Enjoy...

My expectations were very low going into this flick. The camera work and direction were much better than I anticipated from the trailer and reviews. The story is way out there and some of the acting should have been better, but I will probably end up watching this again.