Demons (2017)
Matt Boiselle
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Starring Miles Doleac, Lindsay Anne Williams, Steven Brand
Directed by Miles Doleac
Heaped amongst the piles and piles of possession flicks released over the course of the last, I don’t know…30 years? – Miles Doleac’s Demons struggles to truly find itself and distance itself from the rest of the crowd, instead losing a futile battle to make it to at least the middle of the aforementioned pile.
Parlaying the tragedy of a failed exorcism into a burgeoning suspense-novel writing career, former priest Colin Hampstead has pulled a 180-degree turn and distanced himself from the boundaries of the church, and settled down with his new family. Even more so, his squeeze is the sister of the girl who died during the exorcism that he was performing…talk about opportunistic! The sunny days of a new beginning slowly begin to dissolve into the dark, horrific depths of guilt and regret, and the frightening reminders of that fateful day begin to manifest themselves to the couple, and before you know it the evils of Hell are upon Colin and his wife…and a few innocent guests. While one could glance at the cover art for this film and think “ah, demonic possession,” this film instead uses the title to not only refer to said unholy overtaking of one’s mind and body, but demons in the sense of regressive memories that can infect one’s progression into a happy life, much like an addict fighting their troubles on a day-to-day basis. The trouble here is that this particular film tries way too hard to split the difference and give you both, and unfortunately it falls rather hard on its collective rosary beads.
With cameo roles from names like Andrew Divoff (Wishmaster) and John Schneider (“Dukes Of Hazzard” and “Smallville”), the portrayals of characters is fairly decent, and Doleac does work his role quite nicely, in addition to being the guy who not only wrote and directed the film. If you’re looking for some genuine scares, the film does have them from time to time, and they are legitimately effective, but they’re few and far between, and the notion of slogging through too much dramatic element in order to get to them is a wasteful usage of time, especially for some horror fans who want to feel those hairs standing up on the back of their neck en masse. If Demons had solely focused on the Satanic element OR the underlying troubles within the couple-dynamic due to their traumatic past, then this movie could have been a solid winner, instead it plays out like a patient in a rubber room wearing an “I love me” jacket, bouncing off the walls and rambling incoherently…almost like my writing at times. Perhaps a one-time watch if you’ve got little else to check out, but give me The Exorcist on repeat a hundred times over to scratch my possession-itch.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
