Demonic

WTF did I just watch? This isnt the Neil I remember. It felt like watching a low quality horror sci fi flick. Every Neil short movie and movie shows all the violence and chaos but this just skips over everything. The acting was good but this just isnt it. Very disappointing.

Carly (Carly Pope) is estranged from her mother Angela who was convicted of burning down her care home workplace and killing some 21 people some twenty years ago. She further poisoned another five. Carly is haunted by nightmares of Angela. She has also been estranged from longtime friend Martin after those events and then he contacts her with news about her mother.

When this popped up, I didn't realize that it's a new Neill Blomkamp film. I figured it to be another low budget inconsequential B-horror movie. The initial assumption is not far from the reality. The premise is similar to Jennifer Lopez in The Cell except its visuals are nowhere near as imaginative nor compelling. This story needs something much more basic than that. It needs a ticking clock and stakes and motivation for Carly. If an evil corporation is going to all that trouble, it should do something much more coercive to bring her into the experiment. It has non of that. She just agrees to join this weird experience for no apparent reason. At least give her a beat and a nightmare in between the asking and the doing. She could do the procedure to confront her nightmarish visions and her mother. There is a clear deterioration in Blomkamp's writing and his visual style has stalled at best. There are basic concepts of motivation and characterization that are missing.

Beneath the glossy surface of unique visual ambition and a slew of intriguing, potential-filled ideas and concepts, this is unfortunately just 100 minutes of more of the same nonsensical writing, weak characters, and unbearably stupid dialogue and clichés that have plagued the horror genre for decades.

How is this the same filmmaker behind District 9?

A decade ago I loved South African director Neill Blomkamp for his wonderful sci-fi movie DISTRICT 9, and I thought ELYSIUM was pretty good too (although CHAPPIE not so much). The last I heard of him was of his thwarted idea for an ALIENS sequel with not only Ripley but Hicks and Newt returning alive and well too; I thought that sounded like a great idea, but alas, it wasn't meant to be. So out of nowhere comes DEMONIC (2021), Blomkamp's newest movie as director, but watching this very ordinary possession movie you wouldn't notice his presence.

The first thing apparent is that this was shot on a very low budget during the pandemic, so expect closed sets and a small cast. The second thing is that it simply isn't very good. Possession flicks are ten-a-penny these days and all kind of roll into one, and this one goes through the same motions with contorting bodies and histrionics. I found it very tiresome, and to try to make it different they add in a load of CGI effect "dreamscape" stuff, but that bored me too. Let's hope Blomkamp bounces back from this misfire and gets some of the old magic back.

Please excuse my attempts at humor. It's a defensive reaction.

I really, really wanted to like this film. It has been on my watchlist for like 3 years, and I was constantly checking on it. I hoped for Wan as a director, but when I saw Blomkamp, I was pleasantly surprised. I wouldn't say I liked Elysium, but I think Neill is a talented director.

With that being said, I give this film a lot of credit and a 6/10. It had its moments, but the negatives overcame the positives. As more people will watch it, I think it will drop down to ~5.5 or less.

There were three major problems for me:

1) the dialogue was unbearable most of the time;

2) the amounts of exposition thrown in these were overwhelming. The story comes to a halt for 10-15 minutes, and then BOOM, you get bombarded with information the characters share (the things they already know btw). And it's not that confusing to provide this much flashback.

3) the whole technology/occult combination was fresh, but when they tell you the point of all that, it just becomes a laughable excuse and an insane over-complication of what could have been done.

Throw in some heavy continuity, and the majority of the viewers will probably dislike this. The ending clearly shows that at least 10-15 minutes of it was missing, the main lead teleports way too much, and some scenes end abruptly.

I want to mention some positives as well, the film did look good, and I enjoyed the ending night scenes. I constantly felt like I'm giving this film much more creditworthiness than it's worth, but I saw some potential in it.

And yeah, while interesting in their looks, the simulation scenes lacked creativity, and the entity of which we got no information looks like Radament from Diablo 2.

Overall, this is not a horror film. And as much as I appreciate the effort, I didn't like it as much as I wanted to.