The Devil's Business

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.

I had read several very positive reviews of this movie so I was excited to watch it...I was very disappointed. The ending was incredibly cheesy and silly, the sound effects were way overdone (there is a part with a baby where they play a crying baby sound as if you couldn't tell it was a baby...come on) and the music was this ever-present "typical horror movie" soundtrack. I was a bit put off at first because the plot summary sounded so much like the (far superior) Kill List, and it really is pretty similar...if you took the great cinematography, the unflinching brutality and the budget away from Kill List and then put the music from an 80s episode of Unsolved Mysteries over the entire thing, you might get something resembling this movie. It's only 69 minutes but it felt way too long and was very predictable and obvious. The lead actor did a really good job and the actor playing Kist was effectively creepy and without them this would be firmly in Syfy Channel B-movie territory. I still wouldn't recommend it; this is one that is not worth the hype. Just go watch Kill List again and save yourself the trouble.

The Devil's Business is largely two men talking about their business on the shady side of the law, and the younger man's contemplation of life as a hitman given the older man's experience.

At first, this can be off putting and seemingly slow paced. But, what they are discussing isn't quite as banal as it may seem. There is something deeper happening.

Now, add in some supernatural ritualistic elements from the target of their assignment, and the talking becomes a bit more complex.

Overall this remains a small film that has heart as long as you don't mind a storyline that leaves some gaps in the logic. The acting of the two is earnest if a bit defined by their characters. They are still believable for who they are.

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..

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.