Deliver Us From Evil

I felt a bit apprehensive about checking out Hollywood's latest horror flick in Deliver Us from Evil for quite a few reasons. The first is because it sounded too much like Deliver Us from Eva, that bile inducing L.L. Cool J and Gabrielle Union vehicle that I can't believe wasn't written by Tyler Perry and didn't feature a performance of I Need Love Too by Uncle L. The second is because the last time I saw a movie that looked this weird it was Nick Nolte's Nightwatch; and that ended with me literally being punched outside of the theater by my date because Nolte was having sex with dead people in it. Also it doesn't help that when you look at the movies that are in the theater right now, 90% of them have a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 55% or lower; and that's just awful! But I don't trust movie critics when it comes to horror movies, so I decided to give this a try.

As has become the trend lately, Evil is based off of actual events, and I always take that to mean that 10% is actually based off of reality for general outline purposes and the other 90% is exaggerated for entertainment purposes; so whether or not it actually happened is irrelevant. Now what helps in setting this movie apart is that it plays more like a CSI:Bronx episode than it does a classic horror film, but it still does have some really freaky stuff that takes place in it. The film's first shot is of three soldiers that are fighting in Iraq (I believe) who enter a hole in the middle of a combat zone to make sure that they got all of the enemy. When they do, they encounter something unusual that immediately freaks them out and changes their lives forever. What they encountered was a gateway for an evil spirit that has followed them back to New York and is causing havoc in the city. Sarchie (Bana), who apparently has this "radar" for picking up the weirdest investigations, is assigned to a case that involves a woman attempting to throw her 2 year old child into the lion's den at the Bronx Zoo. At first it just appears to be your typical nut job case, that is until he learns that it is linked to a domestic disturbance that he broke up the night before. And as he gets deeper into the case, more and more inexplicable events start happening and eventually he starts to hear and see things himself as the case begins to affect his family. Sarchie reluctantly reaches out to the unorthodoxed priest Mendoza, who specializes in exorcisms to help him solve the case.

This movie wont scare you in the way that you would expect from a typical horror movie; it works more as a psychological thriller than anything else. But don't let that fool you into thinking that there aren't some fairly creepy scenes in it. Every time Bana goes into a basement or a dark room and objects start moving on their own, you grip your chair just a little harder. And there's also a scene where a mental patient presumably eats a doctor and crawls her way to freedom through a pool of blood that will stick with you for quite some time. My buddy said that they should have played Hungry Like A Wolf during that scene; I disagreed. If you are a parent or simply just like kids, every scene where the demon terrorizes Bana's kid will definitely get to you. And that's just the thing, nothing is so far fetched in this movie, with the exception of the exorcism at the end, that you can just simply write it off as fiction. When you go home, you will start to over analyze every sound you hear or the placement of every item on your dresser. And speaking of the exorcism, this is where the movie packs its punch. The intensity of this scene along with the special effects that accompany it are the clear climax and highlight of this film.

While this movie isn't great, its certainly entertaining. And the casting director should get most of the credit for this, as every character was pretty much spot on with it's casting. I liked this movie and I give it a rating of FRESH!