This whole movie seems like one big game of “guess what’s in my basement?” (hint: don’t play this game in a horror film) You know, you don’t have to keep diabolical artifacts in your crawl space … it can just be standard evil stuff like broken electronics, fashion mistakes, and Christmas decorations. But I digress. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It goes for a whole lot of basement tag shenanigans when it’s not destroying perfectly good waterbeds.
Yeah, there’s a demon in the waterbed. That’s the best part. I’m getting ahead of myself.
Devil Made Me Do It doesn’t waste any time with precursory scares. The film opens with a small child undergoing an exorcism. We’re well past guessing when the priest shows up and the kid is already crab-legging his way across the room. Unfortunately, the exorcism fails; the demon only leaves when offered a better vessel, Arne (Ruairi O’Connor), the suitor to the kid’s older sister. Unfortunately, for all involved, the only witness to this relo is Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) who has just had a demon-induced heart attack. The others won’t find out until Ed wakes up in the hospital..
If you’ve never seen a Conjuring film before, they’re pretty good as horror goes. In short, the films tell the stories of two ghost hunters, Ed and Lorraine Warren (Wilson and Vera Farmiga), who travel the country looking for evil spectres to play “down low … too slow.”. Lorraine has mild supernatural abilities allowing her to see things others do not; this almost compensates for her godawful wardrobe. These
two have exorcists on speed-dial … or, would, if they didn’t live in the 1970s.
The Conjuring is fiction, but the Warrens were real people and The Conjuring franchise borrows heavily from their memoirs. In this installment, the Warrens are part of the first ever legal defense of “it wasn’t me; it was the demon inside me,” a fairly dangerous legal precedent. The case? Well, Arne went back to the animal shelter where he works and stabbed his boss twenty-two times for playing “Blondie.” Really? Twenty-two times? Was that necessary? Blondie only calls for five … six stabbings tops.
Now how is this one? I loved the waterbed demon. The scares were not as present in this film as previous iterations, but they were enhanced much more by setting than circumstance … in other words, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It seemed much more standard than innovative. Basements are going to be scary. Ho hum. Show me the thing that makes my skin crawl. Past Conjuring films have quite unnerved me; I’m not going to lose any sleep over Devil Made Me Do It. I also couldn’t figure out the villain – was it an actual demon or some weird occultist? Was one of them not actually dead? It doesn’t matter. This is a better film than most horror, but such is damning with faint praise. Horror only ranks above Godsquad for general quality of genre.
A franchise with scare reservoir
Appeared without leaving a scar
Well, demons so tragic
Can you summon some magic?
Try Conjuring up a third star
Rated R, 112 Minutes
Director: Michael Chaves
Writer: David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick
Genre: Basement games
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Horror enthusiasts
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Occultists
