DEVIL'S DUE

Zach and Samantha get married and go on their honeymoon to Santo Domingo. Between excursions and nightlife, the two let a taxi driver take them to a nightclub, where something unusual happens. The two wake up the next morning in their hotel room with a bad headache and a slight memory lapse, leaving for the United States as if nothing had happened. Back home, Sam discovers she is pregnant even though she has been taking the pill regularly. The pregnancy starts off well, but little by little something begins to change in the woman, developing a series of unsettling psychic powers and an extraordinary strength. Moreover, someone is insistently monitoring the newlyweds' house. If "The Last Exorcism" and "The Other Side of the Devil" had explored the theme of demonic possessions with the mockumentary technique, we certainly had to expect that found footage would also explore the mini-theme more akin to the exorcistic one, that is, demonic pregnancies. And punctually arrives "The Devil's Due" ("Devil's Due"), a title on which Fox was betting a lot and which instead represented a resounding flop at the US box office, collecting, among other things, a series of negative reviews that would make Uwe Boll envious. Despite "The Devil's Due" having some rather evident limitations, perhaps fate has turned its back on it excessively because, if taken exclusively as a semantic exponent of the mockumentary, it has something to say. But let's start with what doesn't work in this film. First of all, "The Devil's Due" arrives late, in its being a "classic" found footage it appears damn dated, showing us how limited (and limiting) this language is becoming for horror cinema. Despite a continuous search for different points of view that are the handheld camera of the protagonists, the surveillance cameras of parking lots and shops, recordings of a home closed-circuit system and smartphones in the hands of third parties, a bit like in the ingenious superheroic "Chronicle", "The Devil's Due" transmits a sense of narrative and visual staticity that places it rather evidently alongside the first "Paranormal Activity". And probably the saga produced by Oren Peli and Jason Blum is the true inspirational core of everything, in the sense that the use of a demonic sect and the onset of superhuman powers in the protagonist, bring this film rather evidently close to the cited saga with the home demon. We therefore do not find real novelties in this work and if it is equally evident the desire to explore new thematic horizons that connect to cult films of the past such as "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Believers – The Believers of Evil" (with a touch of Carpenter's "The Lord of Evil"), one notices above all a tired reiteration of things already seen and already said in the last 5-6 years. At the helm are Matt Bettinelli-Oplin and Tyler Gillett, who had already tackled the mockumentary language with the last episode of the first "V/H/S", one of the most successful of the anthology, and even in this case one can find several affinities with "The Devil's Due" that go beyond the language used, from the satanic sect to the hectic finale that shows the demonic effects directly on the home infrastructure. What does work in "The Devil's Due" is a certain care at the screenplay level, especially in the writing of the dialogues, which is rarely noticed in this type of films. There is an elaborate script, perfectly constructed in three acts, and the characters say and do credible things (well, of course, the tendency to record everything even when it is not necessary is present here too...), managing to make us attach to them. In particular, a certain skill and involvement are noted in the female protagonist, Allison Miller, already seen in "The Last Vampire" and "TerraNova", who manages to render effectively the progressive change given by the pregnancy of her character. Deployment of visual effects superior to the standard that justify, in fact, the 7 million dollar budget, although they are used intelligently and never invasively. In short, all in all, "The Devil's Due" appears as a wasted opportunity, the possibility of saying something new with the mockumentary technique translates into the actual further repetition of the usual clichés and the usual situations. It is watchable and is certainly not among the worst representatives of this sector, but honestly, it was not needed at all. Add half a pumpkin.