Oh, this one hurt. Then again, if you're a fan of unintentional laughs, all the horror represented is LOL funny. The rest is a total annoyance.
Don't Look At the Demon (yup, just a line in the movie) suffers from a completely incompetent script. The two guys who wrote this: Please stop. From creating plot holes with nonsensical information, to every character having absolutely nothing to say, it is brutal to sit through. Literally, characters are interchangeable, as none of them say anything in a remotely interesting way. Even key supernatural plot points are met with matter-of-fact blandness. Watch a Tarantino movie! Sheesh. One character has a personality. And it's a bad one.
Characters go: Jules, the troubled medium, who you CAN spot a mile away, because you've seen Fiona Dourif in a dozen other things. The rest of the cast is rounded out by a number of interchangeable guys with beards, the baby-faced member of the television show production, who gets possessed by the demon... and couldn't pull off menacing if he was covered in blood, boils, maggots, and melted into a pile of goo (all other "scares" prior to the possession are strictly loud jump scares), an Asian woman and a monk with unintelligible accents, then there's the vanilla pregnant wife, who's being haunted. There is an abundance of ear-splitting screaming, causing reaches for the remote.
So, Jules, as a child, had the ability to contact the dead. And, we run into trouble right away with the plot. What haunts Jules 20 years later, is the fact (or so it seems) that a demon possessed and killed her younger sister. Redundant flashbacks punctuate the entire duration of the film. The demon says she killed her sister. The only logic I can conjure is, Jules is subsequently possessed under the bed, in the final flashback. Blink and you miss it?! Frankly, I was too fried to rewind. Worse, Jules recounts the story as: My sister had a crush on a boy who died, we contacted him, and he wouldn't go away. Soooo, key plot point. Not made abundantly clear.
At another point, recounting the same story, Jules says ever since that incident, she has lost the ability to contact the dead. Yet she's the star of an apparently EXTREMELY successful paranormal TV show. Say what, writers?! Worse still... After watching the monk give an agonizingly painful, and mandatory, back tattoo (where the woman throws up slime and nails?), gives Jules a medallion to regain her abilities during their trip (not revealed 'til the end). This is a rather egregious blunder. She even stated, regarding her show, she 'Might as well use (her) powers to make money.' Which is it?
So the TV show and its star medium are out touring Asia(!), and Jules' technique for weeding out the fakes from the truly haunted, involves her being able to "mystically" take a quick glance at... emails?! WTF. She spots a live one, watches the couple's video message to her (two Americans living in Malaysia), and all they do is gush about what big fans of the show they are, and to "Please help (them)." Direct quote. Yup, it's plain to see. This couple's in mortal danger!
You got: Manufactured, out-of-the-blue couple's drama, multiple dummy walls axed down, leading to hidden rooms, and crunchy fetus eating. I'm under the impression these filmmakers were trying to meld paranormal TV shows, demon possession, and Japanese shock cinema, a la Takashi Miike (certainly along the lines of his outrageous Masters of Horror installment). Pretty much a failure on all fronts. I mean, Dourif broods it up, and there are laughs due to sheer incompetence. Two stars.
SPOILER I'm left to assume somehow the demon they've, er, traced to Malaysia is the same demon from Jules' childhood in America. Four hours away from where she regained her abilities. Break out your highest tolerance for suspension of disbelief!
Don't Look At the Demon (yup, just a line in the movie) suffers from a completely incompetent script. The two guys who wrote this: Please stop. From creating plot holes with nonsensical information, to every character having absolutely nothing to say, it is brutal to sit through. Literally, characters are interchangeable, as none of them say anything in a remotely interesting way. Even key supernatural plot points are met with matter-of-fact blandness. Watch a Tarantino movie! Sheesh. One character has a personality. And it's a bad one.
Characters go: Jules, the troubled medium, who you CAN spot a mile away, because you've seen Fiona Dourif in a dozen other things. The rest of the cast is rounded out by a number of interchangeable guys with beards, the baby-faced member of the television show production, who gets possessed by the demon... and couldn't pull off menacing if he was covered in blood, boils, maggots, and melted into a pile of goo (all other "scares" prior to the possession are strictly loud jump scares), an Asian woman and a monk with unintelligible accents, then there's the vanilla pregnant wife, who's being haunted. There is an abundance of ear-splitting screaming, causing reaches for the remote.
So, Jules, as a child, had the ability to contact the dead. And, we run into trouble right away with the plot. What haunts Jules 20 years later, is the fact (or so it seems) that a demon possessed and killed her younger sister. Redundant flashbacks punctuate the entire duration of the film. The demon says she killed her sister. The only logic I can conjure is, Jules is subsequently possessed under the bed, in the final flashback. Blink and you miss it?! Frankly, I was too fried to rewind. Worse, Jules recounts the story as: My sister had a crush on a boy who died, we contacted him, and he wouldn't go away. Soooo, key plot point. Not made abundantly clear.
At another point, recounting the same story, Jules says ever since that incident, she has lost the ability to contact the dead. Yet she's the star of an apparently EXTREMELY successful paranormal TV show. Say what, writers?! Worse still... After watching the monk give an agonizingly painful, and mandatory, back tattoo (where the woman throws up slime and nails?), gives Jules a medallion to regain her abilities during their trip (not revealed 'til the end). This is a rather egregious blunder. She even stated, regarding her show, she 'Might as well use (her) powers to make money.' Which is it?
So the TV show and its star medium are out touring Asia(!), and Jules' technique for weeding out the fakes from the truly haunted, involves her being able to "mystically" take a quick glance at... emails?! WTF. She spots a live one, watches the couple's video message to her (two Americans living in Malaysia), and all they do is gush about what big fans of the show they are, and to "Please help (them)." Direct quote. Yup, it's plain to see. This couple's in mortal danger!
You got: Manufactured, out-of-the-blue couple's drama, multiple dummy walls axed down, leading to hidden rooms, and crunchy fetus eating. I'm under the impression these filmmakers were trying to meld paranormal TV shows, demon possession, and Japanese shock cinema, a la Takashi Miike (certainly along the lines of his outrageous Masters of Horror installment). Pretty much a failure on all fronts. I mean, Dourif broods it up, and there are laughs due to sheer incompetence. Two stars.
SPOILER I'm left to assume somehow the demon they've, er, traced to Malaysia is the same demon from Jules' childhood in America. Four hours away from where she regained her abilities. Break out your highest tolerance for suspension of disbelief!