DEVOUR

Jake Cummins receives as a gift from a friend for his birthday the subscription to an online game, "The Pathway", where you just need to enter your data and your phone number and then receive instructions on "missions" to carry out. Apparently, Jake's friends were already subscribed to this game, but little by little, they start to behave strangely and go as far as murder, immediately followed by suicide. Jake now has to reach the source, the one who designed the game, before he also commits the fatal act. We are faced with one of those baffling pseudo-horror products that are distributed exclusively for the home video market. "Devour" does not deviate from the direct-to-video tradition, offering the viewer a very weak product that inexorably sinks into the mediocrity of any of its components. Let's start with the story. The video game that kills had already been treated in an original way and with good results in "Brainscan - The Game of Death", a film directed in 1994 by John Flynn, and recently brought back into vogue (with slasher variants) in "Stay Alive"; "Devour" however only slightly exploits the initial idea of the killer game, a game that you can in no way understand what purpose it has and what kind of fun it can provide for the player... in short, in the film "The Pathway" it appears as something very "in" for the protagonists, but everything reduces to a couple of phone calls (the caller has the same voice as the player) that give very stupid missions to complete. Hmm! The narrative development soon abandons the theme of the video game, moving from a clone of "The Game" by David Fincher to somewhat intrusive and ridiculous satanic developments. In practice, multinational conspiracies suddenly appear, with connections even with the Devil himself! The involuntary ridiculousness is therefore just around the corner, and the generous appearances of demons equipped with mastodontic horns and goat legs certainly do not help to curb the sense of farce that pervades much of the film. If all this were not enough, the film in question has explicit semi-serious pretensions that imply not only social criticism of power, but also a wholly authorial tone given by dilated narrative times and pedantic and redundant dialogues that often incite the viewer to abandon themselves in the arms of Morpheus. The pedestrian "depth" provided to the characters is of little use, as it falls into only 3-4 scenes in the most obvious stereotype: handsome protagonist but strangely an outsider due to internal conflicts in his person offended by the absence of his parents; close friend and a bit stupid who you learn to hate after three seconds; confidante friend who gives it away like bread; water and soap girl who plays the nurse and shows an explicit interest in the protagonist, punctually reciprocated. And so on. Only in the fairly discreet final twist, in the careful photography and in the attractive opening titles can you find a minimum of interest, because otherwise you really have to deal with a boring and laughable film that is forgotten a quarter of an hour after finishing the viewing. Not recommended.