The Devil's Business

A sure thing in cinema is rarely just that, especially in horror films. This is the case in The Devil's Business, in which veteran hit-man Mr. Pinner and his greenhorn associate Cully wait in the home of a target due to arrive later after attending an opera, Mr. Kist. It seems easy enough, but after the discovery of a devil worship altar in a shed things start to go pretty pear shaped and pretty soon the night is one of terror. I'm not usually drawn to horror films with criminal protagonists as the nature of their work immediately puts them at a remove from my natural sympathies. However writer/director Sean Hogan conducts things with great skill, drawing inspiration from theatre to make things instantly compelling. Pinter's The Dumb Waiter was apparently a source and the characters of Mr. Pinner and Cully come out and grow from their very first exchange of dialogue, on the one hand we have the old master, wise, cautious and with little time for any consideration other than making things go absolutely smoothly, and on the other the young man, the thug in training who tries to talk the talk but constantly reveals his inexperience. Billy Clarke is great as Mr Pinner, sharp, sarcastic and assured while Jack Gordon is equally good as Cully, clumsy, curious and eager he brings a naive likability to a role which in the wrong hands could grate. They share fine chemistry and so as events get out of control an impressive level of pathos emerges along with the suspense, one genuinely hopes these two will get away OK. Rounding things out Jonathan Hansler is suavely sinister as the classy Mr. Kist, while Harry Miller makes for a solid old school boss. The film makes good use of shadow and darkness, with good use of eerie blue twilight as well as rich red, and calm and controlled camera lets the actors and dialogue shine whilst milking the uneasy setting, a highlight scene involving Mr. Pinner recounting a scary story as the camera moves slowly on his increasingly strained face, much like watching an intense monologue from the front row of a theatre. Some may find the dialogue a bit overwritten but I really appreciated it, I thought it great to see a film where the writing is so integral. Towards the end things do get a little out of control with traditional grue and madness that doesn't sit so well with what has gone before but on the other hand its still pretty unnerving and it does bring a certain needed release, without sacrificing too much power. Basically I thought this was pretty excellent, highly recommended if you can dig horror with a slow burning fuse and lots of talk.

The Devil's Business just came across as an extremely low budget made-for-TV movie. It was heavily dependent on the conversation between just 2 people for the majority of the movie duration. In order to carry that sort of setup off you're going to need some top quality acting and while the acting was occasionally decent in this movie, it was also sometimes below average.

Both Billy Clarke and Jonathan Hansler gave decent performances for the most part but Jack Gordon couldn't really match them for most of his on-screen time, although there was one scene where he demonstrated his true capability and that just about saved his credibility. Perhaps the scripting for his character was part of the problem. All the actors showed promise but they really needed more time and more takes to film the scenes perfectly. I assume either the budget didn't allow them to do this, or the director didn't spot the potential for improvement.

The writing overall was good and could even be considered the stand-out feature, it's just a shame that the budget couldn't be stretched considerably to make this into a real film and bring out the writing with cut-scenes and great cinematography. Instead, nearly all the action takes place in a darkly-lit small house somewhere in England. As a result, the visual imagery is just dull and boring for most of the movie and it gets tiresome rather quickly.

The production value was just a notch above the sort of movie a student might make at college or university, it was just so low that it was almost filmed like an episode of some British television show from the 80's, just sadly not with the same sort of entertainment value.

All the actors had some passion to their work, the writing was decent, the direction, while flawed, showed promise. But as a complete package, a fairly terrible movie that I just can't recommend. Maybe with a bigger budget it could have been a totally different story..

A clear rip-off of Ben Wheatley's KILL LIST, THE DEVIL'S BUSINESS is a hopeless travesty of a film. Shot almost entirely in the dark with mainly just two actors on the screen, it sees a couple of hit-man - a seasoned professional and his rookie apprentice - visiting a house to carry out a hit. Once there they find the place deserted so they sit round for about an hour of screen time, waiting for him to show up.

The story is extraordinarily low budget so this needed a fantastic script to make up for it. Sadly there isn't one. The acting is hopeless, particularly on the part of the inexperienced younger guy, but it's the dialogue that crushes the life from this one. There's a ten minute monologue which is one of the dullest ever and has no real connection to the central story, as tenuous as that is. It appears somebody researched the life of Aleister Crowley and decided to do a modern-day version of the tale but the effort is entirely unsuccessful. Indeed THE DEVIL'S BUSINESS is the worst horror film I've seen in a long time, and that comes from somebody frequently exposed to the worst late-night excesses of The Horror Channel.

Ripe for rediscovery, The Devil's Business remains a tense, thrillingly unpredictable, darkly foreboding, palpably disturbing Brit-crime/horror hybrid with exhilarating eruptions of unleavened weirdness. A blackly funny, wholly credible, exceptionally well-made independent British horror film, The Devil's Business has an nihilistic, doomy ambience, with rigorously compelling performances. Frisson-hungry fans of equally skewed Brit-horror eccentricity like 'The Ghoul' 'Mum & Dad, and 'K-Shop' are sure to appreciate the no less Mephistophelean menaces lurking oppressively within 'The Devil's Business'. It is extraordinarily rare to discover a genre feature that commingles gritty crime and lurid folk horror tropes so adroitly. Sean Hogan's infernally creepy The Devil's business is a heady distillation of Stephen Frears The Hit and the weirder elementals of monster master Clive Barker.

...and I'm saying that as an obsessive fan of Kill List--as in, watched it dozens of times. Another reviewer here claims that if "rips off Kill List" and that is simply wrong. True, it features two hit men, one English, one Irish. They run into trouble on the job and the subgenres switch from crime drama to folk horror, but the dynamic between the two principals are completely different, plot doesn't come close to resembling Kill List and, while it can be argued that it's not as good as Kill List, it isn't a bad film by any means. Performances were impressive, especially Billy Clarke's Pinner, the plot was fairly original, and while it isn't terrifying, there are a couple of nice creepy moments.

To be honest, I might have been disappointed if I paid full-price at a theater, but to watch it I Shudder while recovering from a bug wasn't a bad way to kill 90 min or so.