Demonic

Demonic (2015)

Dir. Will Canon

Written by Max La Bella, Doug Simon and Will Canon

Starring Frank Grillo, Maria Bello, Dustin Milligan, Cody Horn, Scott Mechlowicz

DEMONIC is a movie which, at least on paper, is basically screaming at you to avoid it at all cost. It’s a haunted house movie, for one thing, which is already strike one. And it’s at least partially a found footage haunted house movie, which by all rights ought to be strike two and three immediately, right off the bat. And it has a circular flashback structure, which means we spend almost the whole movie watching the events which unfold after all the cool stuff happened, and the rest of it watching a flashback to the events which lead up to all the cool stuff that happened, and because it’s found footage, you can damn well bet that right as soon as we actually finally fucking reach the cool stuff, shoot, wouldn’t you know it, the camera falls out of someone’s hand and we don’t really catch much. It goes without saying that all the characters are corny stock types played by gloomy pouty thirty-somethings playing twenty-somethings, and they’re no fun at all, and the only two real actors in the cast probably spent about a day apiece on set, in one single location, without being involved in any way in whatever paltry “action” there is to enjoy.

And then there’s the fact that after being made in 2013, it sat around waiting for two years before it finally got a triumphant public premiere… in Brazil. And then a little bit later in Turkey. Exhausted from too much excitement, it then sat around waiting for an American release until 2017, when prestigious Spike TV gave it the red red carpet treatment (the coveted Thursday 8PM slot?) before dumping it onto Netflix, where I, clearly in an equally low-effort mood, discovered it. And if that wasn’t enough, it has such a magnificently lazy, generic name that it sounds like something the Weinstein Company* would use to retitle a new masterwork by a great Asian auteur before releasing it in America three years after the rest of the world saw it with 40 minutes cut out, just to absolutely ensure no one would pay any attention to it and they could keep claiming that Americans weren’t interested in Asian cinema.*** All you'd have to do is throw in a “produced by Charles Band” and you’d have assembled pretty much every possible red flag for an unwatchable piece of shit.

And yet, somehow, DEMONIC isn’t quite as bad as it has every right to be. I guess I can’t quite call something so infuriatingly low on real whammy “good,” but I found it inexplicably watchable, or at least much more so than you would have any real reason to expect.

The structure is simple enough: cool guy cop Frank Grillo (two PURGES) arrives at a notorious haunted house to find that a bunch of fool kids had come there to film a seance for one of those miserable found footage ghost shows, and that they have been correctly and reasonably butchered, with only one survivor (Dustin Milligan, EXTRACT) to be interviewed by psychologist (police psychologist?) Maria Bello (A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, PRISONERS). He tells a flashback in the form of found footage (?) some of which the police are also watching as they recover the demonically glitchy consumer-grade cameras the kids were filming with. It’s a tale as old as time, where a bunch of infuriating stereotypes mugging for the camera decide to go to an evil house where this guy’s mom and a bunch of other kids were massacred years ago under exactly identical circumstances, and do the exact same things that led to that other massacre. Man, between this and DYING BREED I’m starting to see a lesson emerge: hey kids, if a loved one was involved in a horrific violent death, why not try not repeating the exact steps that led to that horrific violent death years later, huh?

So far I have not described a good movie at all, and that’s because I’m still stalling for time trying to think of any tangible reason why this movie isn’t total trash. The most obvious one, surprisingly, is actually the production itself. Unlikely as it may sound, this was actually produced by James Wan, right between his big rebound from the ever-diminishing SAW series**** with INSIDIOUS, and his leap into big-time cash cow fame with THE CONJURING. (Now that I’m typing all this out, I’m starting to see how it ended up with such a dopey name. Giving horror movies crushingly generic one-word titles is basically his whole career. Thank god GHOST is already a thing). I’ve never been a huge fan of Wan, but his productions always boast rock-solid filmmaking fundamentals, and that is the case with DEMONIC as well. OK, not the found footage parts, obviously. But certainly more than half the movie was shot by Michael Fimognari (Mike Flanagan’s go-to cinematographer on OCULUS, BEFORE I WAKE, GERALD’S GAME) right before he hit the big times and started shooting multiple crappy but nice-looking horror movies every year. Fimognari does something rather rare by successfully lighting night scenes in a natural way which still feels eerie, which, along with the appreciably imposing Louisiana locale, goes a surprisingly long way towards striking a good spooky vibe.

That vibe is vitally important, because not much is ever actually happening, but the filmmaking is solid enough to make even a J. J. Abrams Mysterybox™ this derivative and lazy appealing enough a carrot to make for a passable 83 minutes. It’s helped considerably by Grillo and Bello --seasoned vets of retaining their dignity even in abject crap-- who do a sturdy job of making their stock exposition delivery vehicles seem lively enough to pass for actual characters. Bello in particular is well on her way to becoming a modern-day Peter Cushing or Lance Henriksen willing to show up in whatever abysmal garbage you want to hand her and still turn in a real performance for a few scenes in a single location before she disappears for long stretches. Gotta respect that. You ever see her and Sean Bean in THE DARK (2006)? It’s a real solid mid 2000s surreal horror film from the director of GINGER SNAPS and creator of that show Orphan Black that everyone is always hassling me to watch, which unfairly got passed over at the time, but it’s an actual showpiece starring role for her and seriously worth your time, I gotta review that someday.

And yes, I’m stalling again, because now I got to say something I really don’t want to say about DEMONIC, or any film: As miserably lame as these characters are and as empty of whammy as most of this film is… I… (I can’t believe I’m saying this) I… I don’t… hate the use of found footage here, all the time. Ugh, OK, gimme a minute, I got to go sit in the shower and cry for a little while.

Here’s the thing, DEMONIC actually uses the format in what should be immediately apparent to anyone with half a brain is the correct way: for specific sequences that benefit from a first person point-of-view. And sparingly. The narrative gives a good reason why there are cameras present, and it makes perfect sense that the characters would be filming this scary shit, because that’s exactly what they came here to do. And when there are things happening which the film would still like us to see, but which would make no sense for a character to be filming or would be visually hard to communicate in that format, guess what: they just cut to a normal unmotivated shot from a real professional camera. That gives them total freedom to use a first-person-perspective to highlight the subjective intensity of particular sequences, but also the opportunity to shoot something in a way which makes more visual and narrative sense in cases where the first person POV wouldn’t work as well. The result is one of the most natural uses of the conceit I’ve ever seen, even if the actual “footage” still feels fake as fuck because these characters are ridiculous cornballs.

I'm more terrified by the camera than the ghost face.

The flashback structure, interspersed with Bello’s interview of the sole survivor, also has one other unexpected, but readily apparent, benefit: it strikes the exact familiar tone of the classic reality TV format -- raw action material edited together with “confessional” interviews filmed later which comment on the original footage. It’s hacky as hell, but it’s hacky in in a particular mode which is as comfortable as old slippers for a generation raised on reality TV, and consequently feels much less like lazy, pandering screenwriting than it ought to. That’s hardly high praise, but in a horror context, this lame-ass conceit turns out to have a second (and slightly less expected) benefit, too: it allows the dumbass characters from horror movies to retrospectively try and explain their dumbass decisions which led everyone to getting ax-murdered. Again, is this laughably lazy and hacky tell-don’t-show bullshit screenwriting? Sure, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t kind of work, somehow, almost certainly entirely by accident. If you’ve ever wondered “why the fuck would they split up and all go separately into the basement!?” -- well, here’s a survivor, let’s ask him. In the right hands (and these are certainly not the right hands) I can actually see this device allowing for quite a bit of cleverness. That’s not even remotely in the cards here, but at least it’s surprisingly functional.

So I dunno, man, all this stuff just kind of… works. Or at any rate, works better than it, by all rights, ought to. And somehow that was enough to string me along. This is pretty much the exact opposite strategy of the kind of horror film I usually feel comfortable praising: instead of making up for incompetent fundamentals with constant whammy and imaginative craziness, DEMONIC uses unexpectedly competent fundamentals to make up for its utter lack of content. I just got finished complaining about how this wasn’t enough to save DREAM HOUSE, and yet here I am just a week later with my tail between my legs, admitting that even though DEMONIC is at least as stupid and focused on the wrong things, it’s semi-watchable. Maybe because at least DEMONIC doesn’t have any pretension about interesting characters or psychological truth? All its shallow competence is narrowly focused on just churning out standard genre crap, so at least it doesn’t get distracted trying to convince us that anyone on-screen is having interesting emotions or relatable human experiences. It just wants to throw an eerie vibe, some creaky jump-scares and a daffy twist at us, and it is just mechanically proficient enough to do exactly that and no more. And it turns out that was just barely enough in this case, at least for me. But I sure don’t feel good admitting that. Not one bit.

I mean, Jesus Christ, structuring the script as some kind of clue-gathering after-the-fact detective movie, when we know god damn well there’s no fucking mystery to solve, it was just ghosts? What the fuck is wrong with me? I gotta lie down.

*Currently circling the drain after it was revealed that Harvey had privately been doing to women the same thing he’d been publicly doing to foreign imports for years**

** Yes, I realize when I get to hell that joke's gonna be the first thing they bring up. I can only beg forgiveness and try to explain how giddy I am that everyone else on Earth now has much better reasons to feel the same hate for Harvey that I have silently nursed during his notorious two decade career of either ruining or refusing to release major Asian action movies. But Jesus Christ, leave it to Harvey Weinstein to turn out to be an even bigger scumbag than I had imagined possible, and congratulations on doing what I assumed couldn't be done: somehow finding a way to lower my opinion of mankind (and men in particular) even beyond what 2017 had already managed to accomplish.

*** Supposedly its original shooting title was actually HOUSE OF HORROR, which is possibly the only conceivable title even more generic than DEMONIC.

*** Somehow against all logic and reason there’s a new one that came out literally last Friday, in 2017.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	Every House Has Its Secrets, a magnificently generic tagline to go along with that title
TITLE ACCURACY	I dunno, I guess, in the most generic possible sense.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Haunted House/ Found Footage
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Maria Bello? Granted, I’ve seen her in some of this DTV horror shit before, but come on, she’s a big deal, right? And Frank Grillo was in Captain America 2!
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Much talk about how grackles are the servants of darkness (which makes sense because holy fucking hell do they make a sound which could only come from Satan) though only one actually causes us any problems in a lame jump scare
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Oh definitely
POSSESSION?	yes
CREEPY DOLLS?	There’s a creepy room filled with dolls, though I’m unclear exactly why since the residents of the house are all described as adults
EVIL CULT?	Seems more disorganized than that, but there was a seance.
MADNESS?	Or possession
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Actually yes, but you’ll need to see it to understand
VOYEURISM?	Cameras watching
MORAL OF THE STORY	I dunno dude, I think just that my standards have finally gotten so low just putting Frank Grillo and some real camerawork in a low-rent found footage haunted house clusterfuck is enough for me to endure to find it all sort of tolerable in a dumb way?