Colossal Olmec Head

Now the intelligence officer has a sister.  She's a reporter, and so she begins following the story of a mystery woman claiming to be a Martian and prophesying doom for all of humanity.  Her brother, the intelligence officer, will pick up a newspaper, see the story on the prophetess, and pull out his picture of the princess-who-never-arrived and lay it down next to the image in the newspaper for the benefit of the viewer.   See, it's the same woman!   The princess doesn't remember herself, however, because she's now a Martian.  This quasi-amnesia/Martian possession requires the sister/reporter and the brother/intelligence officer to combine their efforts to seek treatment for the unfortunate royal.  Meanwhile, a Himalayan hit squad has been tasked with eliminating the princess who has somehow miraculously survived.  This amnesia will cause the hit squad to hesitate in their task which gives time for the brother to intervene.  Shots are fired but, thank goodness, everyone's a wild and terrible shot even at point-blank range.  The hit squad escapes, but our princess remains disturbingly serene.

Did I mention the tiny, identical fairy twins?  You know, the ones who commune telepathically with the larval Mothra?  No?  Well, they are now celebrities in Japan appearing on a game show which makes them important.  So important that their six-inch high counsel will be eagerly accepted by the Japanese national defense committee.    The twins recruit Mothra who is first seen on its personal island being worshipped by primitive tribal types complete with four-foot feather headdress atop the head shaman.  The fairy twins speak almost, but not quite, simultaneously in their high-pitched dubbed-in voices.  The first few times I smiled at this, but they get a good bit of screen time.  After sufficient exposure, they just become another surreal addition to the complicated tangle of plot lines.  Magical, tiny fairy twins, I mean, why the hell not?

Summoned by the twins, Mothra inchworms his way to the Japanese main islands and just-in-the-nick-of-time too.  Rodan has emerged from his rocky crypt, and Godzilla has arisen again from his oceanic lair.  The demon of wind and the demon of water have taken up their old grudge and it's up to the giant worm to sort them out.  Now I remember seeing Rodan in another film on UHF long ago.  That Rodan had a laser in his throat if I recall.  This one doesn't.  He's got the power of great wind from his wings and soars like a B-2 stealth bomber with an turkey head stuck on the front.  He also has the power of feet-scratching and beak -pecking.  Godzilla, in other iterations, has glowing back spines and a heat ray.  This one doesn't.  Instead, he seems to spew a gust of steam which imparts very little damage to Rodan.  Frustrated by their mutual inability to inflict lasting harm, they resort to kicking rocks at one another.  The rock kicking goes on to the point where, honest-to-god, they are volleying boulders back and forth between one another while Mothra observes, his puffy snout moving to and fro like a tennis spectator. 

Now I've seen a Mothra movie or two.  In at least one of those flicks, Mothra actually graduates from corpulent larva to giant moth.  This one doesn't.  Instead, he stays in his larval form throughout the film.  The segmented giant caterpillar has no eyes worthy of the name and only one small pore at the tip of that turgid body.  The phallic comparison might be avoidable if Mothra had any other way of intervening in a monster fight.   Unable to talk the two down in conversation conducted in monster-speech, Mothra resorts to - not making this up - shooting a thin stream of sticky, white liquid at the combatants. Their faces liberally splashed with the caterpillar's ejecta, Godzilla and Rodan take five. 

Before, during and after the three-way monster brawl, the humans are still trying to sort themselves out.  Sister/reporter has a romantic connection with a virile scientist-type (as opposed to the white-haired sage variety).  This hale fellow will lead his scientific expedition into the Japanese hill country to make observations of the main meteorite fall.  The film will return several times to the glowing meteorite until Ghidorah can be born.  Meantime, the Martian/princess, still being pursued by the Himalayan hit squad, requires the attention of a psychiatrist.  The drugs aren't working so it's time for - what else? - electroshock therapy.  [This is the second movie, coincidentally, I have recently seen which features the application of electrodes to pretty lady temples.  The other was John Carpenter's "The Ward" (see my review of same) which, though released in 2010, is set in 1965.  I realize that's only two data points, but 1965 cannot have been a good year for pretty ladies with perceived emotional issues.]

Ghidorah, finally on the scene, begins laying waste to things and, of course, encounters our three earthly terrors so the ultimate battle can commence.  Thunderbolts are thrown.  Boulders are kicked.  Rubbery wings are flapped.  Rodan allows wormy Mothra to mount his back the better to shoot more streams of sticky white juice upon the king of all monsters.  Ghidorah, pummeled by Godzilla's boulders, pecked by Rodan's power-beak and covered with Mothra's  goo, takes his leave of Earth in sheer disgust.

What's the plot?  It's 1984 and secret scientist-types create a fungus to attack coca plants for the war on drugs.   The mold makes quick work of plants, but it also eats human flesh.  So there's your horror element.  Why 1984?  Because it gives the costume lady a reason to glue on period bushy mustaches.  Sometimes the mustaches are crooked, but since it's an intentionally terrible movie, we, the audience, are expected to get the joke.

Because this was a conscious effort to create a parody of a bad movie, it may be unfair to cite the obvious defects in quality, but here goes.  The sound is bad.  So bad that if an actor utters a line off-camera, you will often not hear it or the line will have all the clarity of someone way down a hallway somewhere.  There's no soundtrack except for an occasional attempt at eerie synthesized tones you are meant to associate with more classic B movies of yesteryear.  Resolution is poor: the film has the look of a rushed VHS transfer.   The set is blandly spartan:  nearly all of the action (that word is overgenerous) will occur in an office lunch break room perhaps 15x25.  I would like to say the acting was dinner-theater worthy, but the folks who ply their trade at those 'Buses Welcome' venues at least earn their living.  The dialogue?  Well, I'd just be piling on at this point.

This is a long-distance relationship, so Joey and Stevie will catch a plane flight.  It isn't beneath Stevie to taunt the air-nervous Joey about airborne catastrophe after they board.  Your first real hint of Joey's brittle character will be revealed here when he suffers a panic attack and has to be removed from the plane upon arrival.  The scene then shifts to a hospital room where Joey must recover following his 3-day psych evaluation.  Finally released from the ward, they contact a local friend, Martin.  Martin is only reluctantly recruited to Joey's Jennifer mission, and, like any real good buddy, tries his best to divert Joey by getting him laid.  Martin's diversionary efforts will lead them to a drunken party attended by what can only be generously described as skanks, the term here being applied to both genders.  While it appears at first that Joey has been diverted when he pairs off with one of the women, he ends up instead in a brawl with one of the men getting his ass whupped in the process. 

My own notes tell me that the film doesn't actually introduce Jennifer until the movie has already passed the one hour mark.  Yet she is the prime focus of Joey's mania, the emotional eddy around which the story swirls.  This tension building technique isn't original.  In The Third Man (1949), written by Graham Greene, the central character is a man known as Harry Lime.  Portrayed by Orson Welles, Lime's character doesn't appear on screen until deep into the tale, and the extended search for Lime keeps the story taut.  I do not mean to draw direct comparisons from that cinema classic to the paraprofessional effort at hand.  But whether consciously adopted or merely stumbled upon, the artifice of withholding from the audience that same prize which is so dearly sought by the main character achieves a similar goal.

Okay, seen it now. 

Can I start over?  Because right now I'm feeling pretty guilty for all the above nastiness.  Why?  Because Sorority House Massacre is actually some pretty decent entertainment.  How does the film avoid being grouped with other straight up slasher films?  By going unashamedly camp.  Over the top acting, "sorority sisters" who should be no older than twenty-one but look more like worldly call-girls with inch-long faux eyelashes and stripper panties, and a local sheriff putting on his best Boss Hogg performance all combine, somehow, to convert a slasher horror into a fairly well-done slasher comedy.

Detective Watts, LAPD, is a ball-busting tough guy who's just been suspended by his boss for literally pistol-whipping a perp in the nuts.  A fast cut montage of his character quickly educates us on his bad-ass bona fides.  When a photo of the beat-down appears in the news, he's called before his Captain (Kevin Sorbo in an extended cameo) to turn in his badge and gun.  The Captain is distracted from properly disciplining his detective, however, because he hasn't heard from his daughter who was on her way to Grizzly Cove for that sorority scholarship competition.   While he's being dressed down we will follow Det. Watts as he dives into an instant semi-erotic fantasy involving the Captain's daughter, Holly.  It's totally unexpected, totally over-the-top, and funny to boot.  Emerging at last from his shameful mind-trip, Det. Watts convinces the Captain to let him investigate Holly's vanishing act reasoning that the assignment will, if nothing else, get him out of town and away from the media.

He arrives at Grizzly Cove to be greeted by the hayseed Sheriff and his slinky deputy.  The deputy wears red stiletto heels on duty, and Watts has to exert himself to fend her off so as to maintain a professional distance.  The matronly hostess, Ms. Stella Fawnskin (Fawnskin?), advises Watts that she has assembled only the finest representatives of the sorority's national organization drawn from hundreds of campuses.  Annually, she holds a competition to award a sizeable scholarship.  Quickly we are then introduced to the sorority sisters and victims-to-be, an introduction carried out pool-side so that maximum skin might be on display.  (Our sisters, nominally of college age, are portrayed by starlets as old as thirty per IMDB.com.   They are indeed sufficiently sexy for the purpose herein, but you may find they lack that convincing dew of actual youth.)  As this is a competition, let the games begin.

Pace never falters after our characters are assembled.  Watts soon learns that Holly isn't the only girl to have gone missing, she's just the latest.  In fact, he realizes, whole handfuls of girls have gone MIA over the years that the creepy Ms. Fawnskin has been conducting her little annual retreats.  The mystery established, our sisters meet their fates by the aforementioned bees and fire but also by hatchet or off-screen so that Watts finds only the grim remains.  There will be unexpected twists which I shall not reveal, but the body count will be high.

How did I do on my predictions?  Holly, the Captain's daughter, is dissolved by means of sprayed acid before the opening credits.  So that's one.  The breast count, which I predicted to be "High" came to a mere two pair and those only briefly.  I'd call that "Low," so no points awarded.  Though there is very brief lesbian play, it wasn't accompanied by shower and suds so, again, no credit.  Law enforcement isn't inept so much as working at homicidal cross-purposes.  As for my prediction of wretched dialogue, well, I again score poorly because the film zooms straight to farce with delightfully hammy acting. 

Kevin has an Architectural Digest-worthy residence overlooking the mountains and a lake below.  Here he brings Sadie, his stunning girlfriend of six months for a weekend romp.  She's got marriage designs on him already.  We know this because Sadie admits as much to her life-long bestie, Jennifer (Bianca).  Of course, while she's pledging her love for Kevin to Jennifer, she's also flirting with the bartender to cadge free drinks.  The weekend starts with promise, a half-naked chase to the edge of the lake followed by lake sex.  But things take a turn for the worse when Sadie, post-lake-coitus, throws their clothes in the dryer and discovers Kevin's mobile in his pants and begins scrolling through spicy texts he's been exchanging with none other than Jennifer.   Uh-oh.

Now here I have to pick a nit.  Sadie, clad only in the tightest of panties, dove into the waters and beckoned to her beau.  Horny Kevin can't wait to shuck his fashionable white cotton slacks, and he wades in after her, pulling off his soaked pants only after full immersion.  Guess where the phone was?   Maybe he's a rich guy with a moisture-resistant phone, but mine sure isn't going to survive lengthy submersion in lake water.   I was reminded of a rather famous editing failure from literature of long ago.  It's the one where Robinson Crusoe, freshly shipwrecked, strips off his clothes and swims back out to the wreck to find food and then stuffs his pockets with biscuits before swimming back.  Yeah, I know what you're thinking.  It's a tiny point.  But this film is trying to pass itself off as a psychological thriller with a side-helping of mystery, and a nit, even a tiny nit, can suggest an infection that's going to require a course of medicated shampoos.

Sadie's a mess, we learn early.  In fact, she's a train wreck internally, but without revealing the wherefores of her inner damage, you can know she's a pill-popper.  She spills her purse to reveal about half a dozen prescription bottles.  She's pharmaceutically suppressing something terrible, and its Kevin's ill-luck that he's talked her out of swallowing at least some of those very necessary meds.  Needless to say, Sadie's discovery of her betrayal by Kevin and Jennifer pushes her over the abyss, and, after luring Jennifer to the house as well by texting her temptingly from Kevin's phone, she means to drag Kevin and Jennifer down with her.

Smartly, the plot will focus chiefly on the three main characters, interactions mediated through the lens of Sadie who veers from sadistically vindictive to caring and back again depending on the suffering of her victims.   She will torture them with electric shock while she mentally flashes back to her own repeated electroconvulsive therapy as a young girl.  To ensure that Kevin cannot more easily escape his bindings, she will stuff his mouth with her own pills to keep him half-sedated.  Lessons must be taught, and tools are employed to the do the teaching.  The sledge hammer has been mentioned above, but heavy pliers, a steel table vice, and an outboard motor make cameos as well.

What's missing?  Smart, well-crafted dialogue is too often absent.  The word 'sophomoric' came to mind more than once.  When one of the characters is killed in an escape attempt in a way rather fortuitous for Sadie she utters, "There really is a God after all."  I stopped counting clunkers after that.   As this is a psycho-drama, there must be psycho-resolution.  That resolution, however, is presaged by editing so jarringly artless l was forced to recall MST3K's frequent snark, "And now back to the other movie ..." There are other weaknesses.  One such is the rather incredible way an admittedly crazed, but very slightly-built woman, could successfully restrain two full-grown adults, adults who's very lives she threatens, with not much more than rope and pills.

Presented in a faux documentary format as if it were a Wikileaks greatest hits compilation of found video and cell camera recordings, we are asked to believe that the CDC and Homeland Security have the awesome power to suppress the knowledge of an environmental catastrophe that causes the deaths of some 700 Marylanders.  (I must not be alone in my reluctance to swallow this central conceit as the reported US gross for this film was a meager $30,000.)  The pastiche of footages found will follow about half a dozen story lines to tell the tale.  A rookie journalism major from American University in DC who was on hand at the Fourth of July town blowout knits the patchwork together through narration.  Three years after undergoing the trauma of the event, she can, you see, no longer maintain her silence.  Her story, and that of the stricken village, must now be told.

Exposure to the waters of the Chesapeake, suffused with pollutants such as chicken shit and, why the hell not?, a release of radioactivity from the local nuke plant, produces ugly boils and blisters.  Screaming Independence Day celebrants quickly crowd the overwhelmed local hospital.  The supervising physician drags in the CDC who uselessly suggest bacterial infection and even fast-growing fungus.  But some of the victims have had their tongues eaten out of their heads.  Soon icky critters, mutated deep-sea isopods we are told, begin chewing their way out of their bloody victims.  By the end the once-happy Main Street will be littered with the dead.

One weakness of found-footage films is that verisimilitude can be destroyed if recognizable, i.e., experienced, actors appear.  As the common viewer  will have watched perhaps many thousands of hours of movies and television, this means that the casting director will need to reach pretty deep into that barrel to fill out a cast for a film like The Bay.  While some of the cast are at least nominally professional, their credits tend to be plumped out with single TV episode appearances as "Third Thug" or "Sitcom Girl 2."  Fortunately, this style of movie-making places a considerably reduced demand upon the actors to actually, you know, act.

This is a mutated bug movie, hardly an original core horror plot.  What passes for horror doesn't grip you, however, because that documentary style keeps the tragic victims at emotional arms-length.  In the absence of acting worthy of the name, real dialogue, or a mortal threat to anyone you would care about, this movie fails in just about every way that could entertain.

The Bay has a contemporary setting in a small Maryland town right on the Chesapeake Bay.  Now as your humble reviewer lives in Maryland about two minutes from the Chesapeake, I found this a personal hook.  Though the town in the movie is fictional, and though the film was not actually filmed in Maryland, it could easily have been shot in Solomons Island at the southern tip of Calvert County, one of any number of such villages which relies on tourism, sport fishing, and open-air Summer drinking.  I personally bestow 1 skull for realistic depiction of small town Maryland.  If you lack this personal connection, however, you will want to subtract that skull from the overall grade.

Vital Stats Rating: 1/5 Director: Barry Levinson Release Date: 2012 Studio: Lionsgate

Here's what you won't get.  You won't get A-listers in this film.  My tween son walked in near the beginning and recognized one actor, a bloke who does have a main role in "Being Human".  Not the SyFy Channel version, which is excellent and beloved in my household by the way, but the original UK version of which the American/Canadian SyFy version is an upgrade.  But that's about as recognizable as any of the actors gets.  You won't get planet-ending catastrophe or kaiju knocking over buildings.  You won't get a soaring body count.   You don't get implausibly beautiful actors or teenagers in peril.  By the final credits the boob count stood at zero.  What you do get is a remarkably flowing tale with - sheathing my Ginzu knives now - charming and understated performances from the talent at hand.  You get one reasonably sized beast and a handful of face-gnawing baby beasts.  This creature does retail - as opposed to wholesale - mayhem.  And in this context that works out just right.

Set on an island a ferry ride or helicopter hop from Ireland, our protagonists are believably cut off from greater aid by a storm.  You know this isn't 'Murica because not one person on the island has a gun (does a flare gun count?).  Not even our two main characters, members of the Irish national police known as 'Garda', are armed.  But, this being Ireland after all, our heroes and the villagers do have one irresistible power:  booze!  That's right, the locals figure out that the beast, a blood drinker, finds alcohol lethally toxic.  In Irish fashion, they must protect themselves by throwing a 'pisser' for the whole town in, where else, the local pub.

Many monster movies take themselves too seriously.  Others go straight for farce.  This movie strikes that delicate balance mixing the mugs of monster goo with that occasional chaser of humor.  Finally warming to this movie about one-third the way through, I hit 'pause', and poured meself 3 fingers of amber-colored 12-year old single malt (2 rocks ice no more) and settled in again to cheer on my new heroes.  I also turned on captions because I found myself frequently unable to reliably follow the Irish accents particularly when they were all blowing, for safety's sake,  0.2 on the policeman's breathalyzer.

Now  I normally find the romantic side-stories in a monster flick to be thinly developed.  Plagued by a proliferation of side-plots, too many characters, and aggressive use of the available digital monster budget, love rarely blooms in any credible way in most creature features, and I find them in nearly all cases a shallow distraction.  This movie is not so plagued, and the relationship is allowed to develop naturally, organically, through the entire movie.   In fact, I would have to say, this flick flirts dangerously close to being a romance with monster thrown in.  Maybe it was the single malt talking, but at the end of this one, I raised my empty glass and actually called out, "Kiss her!"

The 'R' rating this movie received must have been for the violent, one-by-one deaths of the unfortunate patients, because it sure wasn't for nudity.  Yah, there is that group shower scene, but that was mandated by federal law requiring shower scenes in movies featuring imprisoned young ladies.   At least it felt that way.  The scene doesn't especially advance the plot, and the showering isn't particularly erotic unless maybe you have a bare shoulder and wet hair fetish.  No.  Despite the ostensible premise and the overt trappings, this movie is trying very hard to be a supernatural horror thriller with a sharp twist at the end.   Does it succeed? 

Well, if you're trying to be a horror thriller, then there must be horror and there must be thrills, preferably combined.  There is a bit of horror:  the imprisoned disturbed young women must meet their gruesome dooms after all.   How about a lobotomy by steel probe through the eye socket?  Or perhaps you prefer electro-therapy with the amps set way above 'healthy'?  So we've got some horror.  It's the thrills that are mostly missing. 

Now with that suspiciously sinister physician and his penchant for experimentation, you'd think that he's just gotta be responsible when the girls on the ward begin to go missing.  Why won't the nurse and doctor just tell Kristen what happened to the missing girls?!  But that theory gets disposed of pretty quickly.  Instead, the plot takes a too conventional turn when it is revealed rather early that the source of evil is none other than 'Alice', a former inmate of the ward.   Alice is dead-with-a-grudge, so now she's haunting the ward as a repulsively decaying walking corpse picking off her former ward chums.   

Why is it so difficult to make a straight-up supernatural horror movie?  I think part of the problem is context.  Movies like "Saw" and "Hostel" set a high bar for torture gross-out.  If you choose not to out-do your competition on the gore aspect (and really, who needs to?), then you simply must capture your audience with a fresh story.  Making up an engaging new tale is admittedly hard.  Jaded audiences will bite down on the bait like a hungry bass if you can give them a new ironic turn to consider in an otherwise by-the-numbers horror flick.  But this film just doesn't deliver anything new.  With the murders being carried out by a rotting corpse/ghost, the eerie doctor, Nurse Ratchet, and the ward guard become reduced to little more than foils for the plucky Kristen to overcome as she undertakes increasingly desperate escape attempts.  

Space is big.  Things we’d like to get to are almost unimaginably distant.  It takes six months for our probes to get to Mars, the nearest of the planets, and even those launch opportunities come only once every two years when our respective orbits line up properly.  It took years for the NASA Galileo Jupiter probe to reach the gas giant because it had to whip around Earth, then Venus, then Earth again, just to pick up speed.  The Cassini probe to Saturn took seven long years to reach the ringed planet.  The Europa mission in this tale takes 22 months to reach its target and much of the story will take place on that journey.

Presented in the trendy ‘found footage’ style, much of film is intended to appear as if it were gathered from mission video cameras positioned both inside and outside the spacecraft.  Frequently, the screen goes small as an inset and, just as frequently, as a split-screen displaying various simultaneous images.  I mention this in part because the film is available on Blu-Ray.  Given that many of the images are intentionally hashed with static to lend that found-footage feel, I am not at all sure that your viewing would benefit from the extra pixels.  Further, you should remember that, given the sometimes awkward positioning of the faux mission cams, you will be seeing quite a few adam’s apples, armpits and bushy eyebrows and kinda up close.  If you really want that in HD, go for it.

Six astronauts, four men and two women, are tapped for the mission to Europa, one of Jupiter’s more interesting moons.  Why Europa?  Because beneath its icy crust lies a moon-spanning liquid water ocean of unknown depth.   As the Mission directors tell us from their pre-mission press conference,  where there’s water there may be life.  (I was moved to re-screen this film because NASA announced this week that Hubbell had imaged geysers erupting from Europa’s surface ejecting thousands of gallons of water per second into space.  Cool!)

Now since the footage we are permitted to see - it’s just been declassified okay? - has been recovered somehow without the crew, that should be pretty good clue that something bad, something real bad, happened to our intrepid and freshly scrubbed explorers.  The tale proceeds with the frequent use of flashback, and so we learn very quickly that mission engineer James Corrigan (Copley) was lost just six months into the mission.  We do not learn the manner of his death until later in the film, but the loss of contact with Earth by means of a solar storm frying the communications electronics coupled with the tragic death of their colleague casts a pall on crew morale to say the least.

Viewers will find intentional congruities with “2001: A Space Odyssey”.  Shortly after launch, the crew is treated to a snippet of Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz, and they smile knowingly at the reference.  Corrigan’s death en route to Jupiter is so close to the manner of Frank Poole’s demise in “2001” that some might cry foul.  Derivative or homage?  Gabe and Tyco of Penny Arcade describe the distinction:  it really only matters whether you like it or not.  Corrigan’s death is an homage.

Some sources describe this film as a “sci-fi/thriller”.  Hmmm.  Well, terrible things happen to our astronauts, particularly after they land on Europa’s surface.  They are there to find life.  Instead, life finds them.  Attrition by accident and encounters with that life whittle our crew down.  But this isn’t a monster movie in any sense you will find familiar.

You will recognize some of the actors.  Michael Nyqvist appeared as the lead male character in the Swedish “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” films.  Sharlto Copley you may recognize from his lead role in “District 9”.   For this reason, I was dismayed to learn that this limited release film grossed under $150,000.  That’s not a typo.  Someone lost big money on this project which will, I am saddened to say, deter others who might venture to make such a film.

The move begins with promise, a simple flyover view of downtown Philadelphia.  Only the image is inverted.  This is surprisingly disorienting for such a simple technique and yet imparts a sense of unease.   Some half of the movie rolls forward in the very narrow confines of the elevator car with the antagonists in easy arm's reach of one another.  The other half of the movie takes place within the building as the building mechanic, the chief of building security and a Philadelphia detective work to free the victims and, increasingly, to keep the trapped from one another's throats.  This division of story is the main weakness of this film.

The drama in the elevator should have been a pressure cooker on slow boil.  When the action is conducted entirely in a single room, the performances, the dialogue, the conflict - all should simmer before they should boil over the top and onto the burner.  Think "12 Angry Men" with Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb or Hitchcock's "Rope".  With well-written dialogue, the guilt of the five might have been teased out by one another in a slow reveal.  Instead, the guilty histories of the trapped are divulged by the efforts of the detective from outside the box, a story-telling technique which adds very little to the tension.

The detective (Messina) comes equipped with a bare-bones tragic back story.  Indecent chunks of the reel are devoted to sketching out this history.  The tragedy has left the detective spiritually adrift, broken inside, we are made to understand.  Now it's not a spoiler, I think, to divulge that this back story will have to intersect with the story of one of the five in the elevator.  But because our cook keeps running from the stove top to the store to pick up extra ingredients for soup (because wouldn't soup be nice with the pudding?) none of the dishes turn out.  This plot linkage ends up weak, unnecessary and distracting and artificially imposes a wholesome coda on a horror movie.  At the end, I found myself thinking of Journey's chestnut, "Don't Stop Belieeeeeevin!"

With Old Scratch himself trapped in an elevator car, there will be blood and very violent death.   To conceal his identity at those moments, the lighting in the car will flash on and off.  Now this technique can work once, maybe twice, to twist necks and slice arteries in a way that leaves the survivors staring warily at those still standing.  When the screen goes completely dark for long seconds, however, it's just silly.  Maybe that worked in the theater, but I was watching this at home with my son, age 13.  When this happened for the second time, he asked, "Uh, why is the screen black?"  Why indeed.  This is a movie fer chrissakes.  If you suddenly disengage my eyes, they begin searching for something, anything, to look at, in this case the glowing LED's on the TV, the XBox, the phone charging cradle.  The sounds of tussling in the dark just aren't enough when you shut down the visuals to literally nothing.  It was like the TV went off.

Pointless narration damages the film as well.  Now we already have an excellent premise if the cook would just keep the menu to that alone.  But no, the narrator has to tell us the devil will come to take his harvest only after a suicide.  Really?  Sez who, your mom?  (Please not that.)  The narrator's mother tells us this as in when- I-was-young-Momma-done-told-me.  This ham-handed explication had the definite feel of a choice imposed after test-screening questionnaire respondents checked too many boxes for "I felt confused."  The movie is called "Devil," okay?

I must deduct further style points for egregious use of a trope.  Here a side character, 'Ramirez', is employed to educate the detective about the devil and how the fates of the trapped must play out because, you know, Ramirez is Mexican and Catholic and stuff, so he will recite prayers to the survivors over the elevator speaker when he's left alone in the building control room.  The white-man detective can't be in touch with that side of himself so cue the superstitious minority to bring the ruggedly secular up to spiritual speed.  Now don't get me wrong, tropes are often necessary plot shortcuts when you are telling a complex story in the context of a movie that will run for only 80 minutes.  Some movie makers have mined box office gold by turning tropes on their head (the "Scream" franchise for example).   But this one is played straight and reflects nothing less than artless storytelling.