Inner Demons
My Review: There’s a girl who is suffering from an addiction problem, and her family is very concerned. They get hooked up with a reality-TV show that is going to document the intervention. Thus we have found footage!
So they have an intervention, she agrees to go to rehab, and they continue to cover her recovery (or lack of one) there. It turns out her problem isn’t actually addiction. She’s addicted to the drugs because they keep the demon that’s possessing her under control. So as the drugs get out of her system in rehab, weird things start happening, including a lot of fairly silly jump scares (like she’s looking in a mirror, and the face in the mirror contorts and screams at us while she stays normal). There’s one guy in the rehab crew who believes in the truth of her problem and tries to help her and gets fired for it. Then of course in the end, there’s a big showdown and exorcism, and things happen. There’s some twists to how it all comes out, though probably nothing you haven’t seen before.
I felt like the ‘scary’ side of this movie was kind of a flop. It didn’t stress me out to watch this. But as an interesting story, it was alright. Not too bad. To be honest, I’m very sick of “if only you guys would have believed the insane supernatural story you were told, you could’ve saved her!” because in real life that is literally
never the right answer. When someone tells you an insane supernatural explanation for what’s wrong with them, they’re wrong, and they probably need even more help than you thought they did. It’s funny how it’s backwards in movies - you get mad at the characters who won’t listen, but in real life, you’d think the people who
do listen are gullible idiots. That’s because in the ‘reality’ of almost every movie, the magic stuff is real, and it’s often pretty obvious that it is, which makes ‘skepticism’ a truly unskeptical position - you’re ignoring the evidence. So you have to work with that, I guess. I suppose without that, you’d have a more boring movie, though I know there have been some movies where it all turned out to be fake and they can still be interesting. But as a standard thing, I think we’re better off with what we have now - magic is more often interesting than reality, so keep the magic in the movies!
My Rating: 3/5 Codex Daemonicas.
My Movie Idea: Like zombies, exorcism is really played out. So hmm, what’s left to exorcise? As I mentioned above, it’s fun and different when things turn out to be fake, but The Last Exorcism did that (well.... not really). One thing you don’t see often, though it is out there, is the flip of an exorcism movie: the parents believe their child is possessed and have exorcisms, lock the kid away, abuse them in various ways, but there’s nothing to it - the horror is the fact that parents can be so evil. I’m pretty sure this scenario has happened in real life too. It’s awful. How about this...
The dad is a meek little guy who begrudgingly goes along with what his domineering scary wife says. The kid is normal, but one day the dad comes home to find the kid is locked up and the wife has a bandage on her arm. She says he bit her and she had to put him away to protect herself. His wife says the kid is possessed and keeps him locked up, feeding him gruel through a slot in the door and stuff like that (some business about purifying his insides with plain food). The dad goes along with it but behind her back he helps the kid some, letting him out for a short time when he can, sneaking him snacks, talking to him. Always very careful not to get caught, as the wife is a cruel taskmaster. When he tries to question it and says the kid seems as normal as someone could be while locked up, she slaps him down hard.
Eventually they have an argument with the dad saying they should just get an exorcism and solve this, starving and torturing the kid isn’t a solution even if he is possessed. The wife is aghast at the notion and fighting it every step. The dad finds her almost-frightened reluctance to be odd (not to mention her change in personality in the last year, she wasn’t so bad before), and eventually consults with some kind of paranormal people who check out the house and are like “yeah, this place has mega bad vibes” and especially in the room where the child is locked up. So when the wife’s not home he arranges an exorcism after all, or maybe some kind of ‘cleansing’ to get the badness out. It doesn’t seem to fix anything, but they pronounce the bad vibes gone. The wife comes home and burns her hand on the door to the kid’s room or something, or just complains of a massive migraine going near there or whatever...
Anyway, it all comes down to him realizing that not only is his wife possessed, but she was infusing evil energy into that room to do something bad to the kid (not possess him, that’s too simple... maybe eat his soul to open a portal or something, I dunno), and there’s a big showdown where she brings out all the usual stuff like throwing people across the room, and for an added dose of fun, the kid ends up beating her with a touch to the forehead and forgiveness for the abuse, because the reason the demons wanted to evil-energy-box him was that he’s actually some kind of holy person (oh maybe he IS possessed, but by an angel? That’s interesting!). Something like that. Details shmetails.
