"The Boy" (2016) d/ William Brent Bell

We last touched upon one of director William Brent Bell's films when we tackled his The Devil Inside (2012) four years ago. While that film dealt with the sexy subject of Satanic possession, tonight's review deals with an elderly British couple and their young son, and  by "son", I may actually mean creepy lifesized porcelain doll, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. The film stars Philly native, Lauren Cohan, who you will probably recognize from her role as Maggie in the wildly popular Walking Dead tv series or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which I've still yet to sit through. I'm in no great hurry to see any superhero stuff, thanks.  Her co-star Rupert Evans, was also in Hellboy (2004) and provided voice work for the uber-mint and equally difficult video game, Demon's Souls, in 2009. Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle flesh out the supporting cast, as Lauren's aging employers. It all starts like this...


"Go ahead and interrogate him concerning the stack of Hustler's I blagged from under his bed..." 
Greta (Lauren Cohan) is a young American girl who's just escaped a smothering boyfriend in the states and accepted employment as live-in nanny to the young son of two mysterious pensioners (Jim Norton, Diana Hardcastle) in a big old creepy estate in the British countryside, only it seems he's passed away years ago, as evidenced by the gravestone bearing his name (Brahms, of all things) on the property, leaving the couple to dote endlessly over a realistic porcelain substitute, as if it were their late son himself. Zoinks, Scoob. She's given a list of do's and don't's before they beat a path to the exit, seemingly for a vacation from their own quirky regimen of bedtime story reading and pointless dinner plate setting for a doll. Luckily there's Malcolm (Rupert Evans), a horny delivery boy willing to shed light on the Heelshire family manias, helping the young woman to forget the relationship mistake she's distanced herself from, in the process.
 

"Fight through the tears and tell me where Geppetto touched you, Brahms..."
Interrupting the strange phenomena she's experiencing in the foreboding darkness of the house (shoes gone missing, the doll seemingly moving from room to room on its own, children's voices, etc. ), is the arrival of aforementioned ex, Cole (Ben Robson), who's successfully stalked his former flame directly to her current place of employment. Meanwhile, the vacationing Heelshire's mail off a letter to their son, before walking into the incoming ocean tide together in a suicide pact. To compound matters, Cole makes the scene with intentions of dragging his ex-girlfriend back to America, whether she agrees to it or not, and her interaction with the surrogate boy only further infuriates him, to the point of getting rough with Malcolm, and even raising the doll violently by the legs into the air, and...you'll want to see where this all ends up for yourselves.


"...and right about here is your nasopharyngeal tonsil."
Bottom line, after the big reveal, which I wont be revealing here, mind you... I was reminded more than once of glorious similar plot devices from made-for-television classics dating back forty or more years, and I like that kind of prompting when I sit down to watch horror moves. I like it a lot. I'm rarely so careful as to avoid spoilers around here, but I'm maintaining a conscious effort to leave all the watching up to you cats out there. If you're anything like me, you'll appreciate the lengths this one goes to deliver quality atmosphere and tension throughout it's run time. For that, I think Three big ones is a fair assessment of the material under the wop-roscope here tonight. Recommended.


Porcelain privilege: He's a lot whiter than you are.

"The Devil Inside"(2012)d/William Brent Bell

Upon seeing the trailer for tonight's review, I turned to my associates and evoked the rite of "callsies" for our next trip to the cinema, it visibly being no clone of Skyline(2010) or Battle Los Angeles(2011), which would cause it to fall outside my genre jurisdiction, and thus, fieldable by the Doctor, who, indeed, grooveth upon the space fodder out of us.As most of the regular readers already know, the films that tend to get labelled "demonic possession" films are usually the ones I get the biggest kicks out of.The more over the top the exorcism criteria, the more my dimples get to poppin'.I could tell ten seconds into the aforementioned trailer what I was gonna be in for with this one, the second effort in the chair from Bell, with lots of Cannibal Holocaust-style found footage and unholy hijinks, and after sawing logs three quarters of the way through Sir Anthony Hopkins bleccch-xorcist copy, The Rite(2011), it was just what ol' B-Dub ordered.Sure, there's nothing much original about Inside, and it borrows heavily from prior less-is-more basement budgeted documentary-style flicks like Blair Witch Project(1999) and Paranormal Activity(2007), but there's plenty of joint-locking, ancient language-speaking, blasphemy-growling chicks with over-dilated pupils skittering in and out of the shaky handheld darkness here, if that's your bag, too, and really, why wouldn't it be.Why wouldn't it be.Despite being panned by critics and moviegoers alike early on, the movie still managed to gross nearly fifty-seven million after topping the box office with a strong opening weekend, proving many of us are just as succeptible to devil women as Cliff Richard was back in 1976.Forwards...

Baby, you had me when you crawled in upside down, screaming "Non Salvus!" in a chorus of baritone voices.
Twenty years earlier on the night of October 30th, Maria Rossi(Suzan Crowley) committed a triple murder while undergoing an exorcism, having spent the past two decades locked away in a psychiatric hospital under Catholic care in Rome.In the present, Rossi's daughter, Isabella(Fernanda Andrade) is producing a documentary on exorcisms, and looking to better understand what happened to her mother all those years ago in the process.After visiting a Vatican-approved exorcism school in Rome, she joins forces with two young priests, Ben(Simon Quarterman) and David(Evan Helmuth), who perform the rites regularly, tagging along as they continue to try to exorcise the demons from a young joint-locked unfortunate named Rosalita(Bonnie Morgan), using modern medical equipment to document her body functions, such as pupil dilation, to help discern whether she suffers from true demonic possession or merely some undetermined mental illness.Rosalita spouts blasphemies in various voices and languages before attacking the film crew, and even calls Isabella by name, despite having never met her.The young woman musters up the guts to visit her mother at the asylum, only to be met with a cell's worth of obsessive paintings and a mammy who's decked herself out in gouged inverted crosses that whispers to her daughter of the murder of children and God's will before letting loose with a wits-rattling shriek.You crazy hot old bitch you. I saw that coming and you still managed to jostle my popcorn bag.Isabella tells the priests that she underwent an abortion some time earlier, and that her mother, institutionalized like Mike Muir, had no way of knowing that tidbit.

"If you'll excuse me, I have a drowning to attempt, errr, baptism to oversee."
With mounting evidence of demonic possession, or, as I like to call it, "aggressively sexy/horny", the priests move ahead with plans of an unauthorized exorcism for Maria, during which she spouts off about "knowing what Ben did" and her daughter's unborn child, before breaking the fuck loose from her restraints and treating both holy men like soft punks, earning some yummy vein sleep-candy from the doctors who rush in afterwards.Ben agonizingly scrutinizes the audio from their session, managing to discern multiple demonic voices speaking in unison during one exchange.Meanwhile, David is performing a baptism for a newborn when he suddenly takes the immersion slightly too literally, and tries drowning the baby in holy water(!) before passing the fuck out, it having been a service of great energy expenditure, little droogies.Later at home, in the throes of possession himself now, obviously, he'll blow his own brains out with a ganked officer's service revolver just as Isabella goes into seizure.At the hospital, Ben sees mortally wounded emergency room nurses as possible evidence that Isabella is also possessed at this point.Certainly a theory, right?Together with Michael, he leaves in a car with her to get her a much-needed emergency exorcism, but she manages to creep him out with talk of that "thing he did" and tries to force Michael to crash the car.Moments later, Michael's also looking pretty possessed as he drives headlong into oncoming traffic, and the video cuts out after the vehicle flips several times.Cue: unsolved case/phony website info before the credits roll.

"No! Not the bore worms!"
Fernanda Andrade, apart from being lovely and Brazilian, worked almost exclusively on television before landing a role in tonight's review, on shows like CSI:Miami, CSI:NY, Law and Order:LA, and Sons of Anarchy.We dig her, highly.Evan Helmuth has also done a lot of work in television, video games, and movies like Garfield(2004).Suzan Crowley has appeared in BBC fare like Grange Hill, The Knock, and Backup, while director Bell took the chair for 2006's genre entry, Stay Alive, prior to tonight's review.I'd file Devil Inside somewhere behind The Last Exorcism(2007) but well in front of The Rite(2011), in terms of effective recent supernatural chills.There's just something inherently cool about losing control of one's body and soul to an agent of pure evil, and when it's a female of the species, well then, I'm gonna need some quality alone time, if you follow me.An overall mediocre affair, but an enjoyable one thats chock full of jump scares and atmosphere, especially if demonism and possession are your bag.On the scale, Inside earns a score of Two biggies.Worth a look.

Another one with twist fever and a double case of guitar blues.