Devil Complex, The (2016)
Foywonder
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Starring Maria Simona Arsu, Patrick Sebastian Negrean, Marius Dan Munteanu
Directed by Mark Evans
Have you heard of this movie called The Blair Witch Project? Came out back in 1999. Was quite revolutionary at the time. Spawned a sequel that flopped but now a lot of people online work really hard to convince you is actually a misunderstood gem. There was even this heavily hyped remake/sequel that came out just a few weeks ago that flopped even worse than the sequel.
I’m going to state something very controversial here that I know a lot of you are going to take issue with. I honestly don’t believe The Blair Witch Project is as highly regarded outside of hardcore horror circles as horror fans want to believe. Horror fans always cite it as one of the seminal horror films of the past 20 years, but have you ever noticed you rarely hear its title escape the lips of mainstream movie-watchers when they talk about their favorite horror films of the past few decades? Horror fans seem to forget a large chunk of the audience that saw the movie back in 1999 actually hated it. I think back to that “Family Guy” joke when Bryan was serving as a seeing-eye dog for blind moviegoers, describing The Blair Witch Project as “nothing’s happening, nothing’s happening, something about a map, movie’s over, everyone in the theater looks pissed.” That pretty much sums up how a lot of average viewers of The Blair Witch Project felt. It’s definitely how I suspect even the most hardcore horror fans will feel about The Devil Complex.
Opening text:
Three filmmakers entered the Hoia Baciu, Romania forest on the 29th November 2012.
They are still considered missing.
Immediately cut to shaky-cam POV footage of two people running through the darkened woods screaming, footage that looks exactly – EXACTLY! – like a scene from The Blair Witch Project.
Cut to more text informing us the footage we are about to watch was taken from footage found amongst the possessions of a professor in 2014 after he committed suicide.
Always baffled by horror movies, particularly found footage movies, that give away the ending before the opening credits. The title hasn’t even appeared on the screen, and we already know this is going to end with everyone dead. Odds are a found footage horror movie is not going to end well; that doesn’t mean you have to spoil your own movie before it even begins.
That professor now appears on camera, reiterating the tragedy to come. He ponders why this deep Romanian forest with the ability to look into your soul chose to let him live — possibly because he’s not actually in the movie? Cut to black, the sound of a gunshot, and the title card.
What follows is the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter of Blair Witch movies.
I don’t know what in this footage would make anyone want to commit suicide. At the very worst it’ll just make you want to fast forward. Or press stop. Either or. Tedious to say the least, yet hardly the stuff of nightmares worth killing yourself over.
The Devil Complex title stems from, as one of the myriad of Romanian locals they’ll interview in the opening minutes informs us, how the forest can prey upon your inner demons and punish you for it. The locals fall into one of two categories: those that issue dire warnings about going into the forest and those that dismiss it as superstitious hokum.
Young documentarians Rachel (Arsu), Tom (Negrean), and Joe (Munteanu) do not heed their warnings, dismissals. They hire a creepy bearded old man guide with a history of spousal abuse who looks like one of the wild feral Santas from Rare Exports to lead them into the forest.
From there, again, does any of this sound very familiar to you?
Head off into the woods to investigate a legend. Get lost in the woods. Find strange symbols in trees. Bicker amongst themselves. Confessionals directly into the camera. Run screaming into the night after something attacks their tent. Get killed off by something off-camera.
It’s one thing to leave things to the imagination of the viewers; it’s another thing altogether for filmmakers to display no actual imagination of their own.
We’re talking about a movie where early on a Romanian local tells them how some people who go into the forest break out into a big red rash for unknown reasons. Sure enough, one of them will develop a big red rash… a development that leads to absolutely nothing and is forgotten about just as quickly.
The movie appears to have been shot on location, giving it plenty of local flavor and gorgeous Transylvanian winterscape to behold. That’s about all it has going for it.
Try as the cast might, when 75% of your movie is first-person footage of people hiking about confused, running around in a panic, yelling the f-word and each other’s names, and long hard staring at things they find far more disturbing than the viewer will, there’s only so much as an actor you can do with that. Even when they begin to panic and argue among themselves, they do so in the blandest way possible.
The makers of The Devil Complex also clearly saw REC because (SPOILER ALERT!) they rip off the exact – EXACT! – same ending. Are you kidding me?
As I’ve stated in the past, filmmakers don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but they should at least try rotating the tires.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
