It might only be the end of February but it looks like The Devil Inside has the award for Worst Movie Of 2012 in the bag
When a rollover-and-beg quote-whore as easily placated as Rolling Stone's Peter Travers is moved to write of your movie that it will "make you puke for all the wrong reasons", it's time you quit making movies and re-enrolled in bartending academy. Such was the fate of The Devil Inside, widely lauded – or something – as the very worst movie of 2012, notching up a miserable 5% on the review aggregating site rottentomatoes.com, having occasioned a rare unanimity among fractious American film critics.
And, yes, it's bad. It's very, very, very, bad. And not bad in a good way, or so bad it's actually brilliant, or any of that. It's the kind of bad that gives bad a bad name. Lingering only on one screen in the single shittiest multiplex in LA just five weeks after its release, it was well suited to its environs, being the laziest, most utterly suspense-free entry in the diminishing-returns genre of the "found-footage horror movie" pioneered by The Blair Witch Project (well, by Cannibal Holocaust, really, but let's not sully this sad story with the names of any good movies) and more recently adopted by the Paranormal Activity franchise.
Oh, and it's a pseudo-doc about an exorcism that's been released far too soon (only six years!) after the comparably rubbishy The Exorcism Of Emily Rose. Ah well, they must have said, we can fix this crap in post. Turns out, no. No retroactive intervention would infuse a single frame of it with the merest scintilla of the terror promised in the ad campaign. And because of this, the producers are forced to rely on an entirely, no, brazenly innovative cop-out, ending the film with a link to a website at which further information on the case can be found. Are you kidding me?
When I was a younger man, bad movies enjoyed a kind of golden age. I was raised on Harry and Michael Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards, their 1981 Anti-Oscars-Kvetch-Screed, and by John Waters's Shock Value, which, contra Peter Travers, opens with the words, "If someone throws up watching one of my movies, it's like a standing ovation," thus promising a refreshingly upside-down critical paradigm. These books, unlike the ads for The Devil Inside, made me want to run to see Plan 9 From Outer Space, or Robot Monster, or anything Waters mentioned by Herschell Gordon Lewis, or Russ Meyer, then still widely deemed "bad directors". Back in those halcyon years when the grindhouses were still stinking up America's inner cities and drive-ins still sullied the suburban night – and before Hollywood took over the B-movie's erstwhile role as repository for all things authentically and toothsomely bad and/or trashy – back then, bad had a variety of meanings, not all of them bad.
But in 2012, The Devil Inside strips all possible ambiguity from the word and we're back in a monochrome world where bad only means bad.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/feb/25/the-devil-inside-is-very-bad
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