The no-star movie Devil (also known as The Night Chronicles: Devil) is based on a story by M. Night Shyamalan,
The movie is apparently the first of a trilogy dealing the supernatural within modern urban society.
If the other two are as lame as this one, I won’t be queuing to see them. The acting is so wooden and the storyline so feeble that there’s nothing that gets the blood racing or the goosebumps raging.
Five people are trapped in a lift of high-rise office building. It soon becomes apparent that one of them is the devil.
Each is bumped off in a movie version of the party game murder in the dark. The lights go out, you hear some scuffling and the sound of a struggle. Up comes the lights and one of the five has met a sticky end. Sticky but not particularly bloody. Director John Erick-Dowdle seems bent on making this a tale of suspense rather than splatter. The first victim dies by having his jugular vein sliced but there is remarkably little blood.
The number of the building they are in, 333, is a number that symbolises the mystery of God. The fact that it isn’t numbered 666 gives you the message that the devil isn’t going to win this time.
The plot of sinners meeting their comeuppance owes much to Agatha Christie‘s 1939 novel originally titled Ten Little Niggers but changed, for obvious reasons, to And Then There Were None.
If you’ve read this book, or seen any of the Saw movies, the twist in the tale is very predictable and not particularly scary. All this portentous and pretentious nonsense leads to the final pay-off line reassuring us if the devil exists then so must God.
In other words, provided that you keep your nose clean or repent before you croak, everything is gonna be fine. Now that’s a load off!
