NYPD vs 666

The opening title card reads “Inspired by actual accounts,” which is distinct from “Based on a true story” in that it reads closer to “Somebody of indeterminate credibility claims something like this happened but mostly we made it up.” Which is understandable given that we’re watching a movie where a guy spontaneously bleeds from injuries inflicted by an invisible crown of thorns and features several incidents that could prove libellous for the NYPD. The filmmakers need to cover their collective ass. They also need to imply that what we’re seeing could’ve happened, Satan is real, and when the going gets tough you want to find yourself an hunky ex-junky Latino priest. Those guys are hard-core.  

Deliver Us From Evil takes place in 2013, a year in which New York apparently suffered constant brownouts and torrential downpours. Officer Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana) gets a hunch one night—his partner calls this Sarchie’s “radar”—and accepts a call to investigate a domestic dispute involving a wife beater who acts like a rabid dog. The radar keeps going off over the ensuing nights and Sarchie winds up fending off large zoo animals, getting bitten by a lady who threw her kid in a ravine, witnessing an exploding corpse and befriending the aforementioned hunky ex-junky (Carlos star Édgar Ramírez), who gradually convinces Sarchie that his radar is really a God-given gift for sniffing evil and that he’ll need to confront his sinful past if he’s ever going to beat the Devil.

Sarchie is a real-life retired cop and demonologist. He co-founded the New York chapter of the New England Society of Psychic Research and has worked with the likes of Ed and Lorraine Warren, who were themselves the subject of a horror movie, last year’s The Conjuring. To Bana’s credit, movie-Sarchie’s eventual conversion to belief in demonic possession is barely foreshadowed. The arc of Deliver Us From Evil, its story an amalgamation of events chronicled in Sarchie’s memoir Beware the Night, is given shape by Sarchie’s reluctant acceptance of his calling.

Which brings us to our director and co-scenarist Scott Derrickson, who I confess to finding somewhat fascinating. Following a wildly unnecessary remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still and the haunted house movie Sinister, Deliver Us From Evil returns Derrickson, who was raised a Christian fundamentalist, to the thematic terrain of his feature debut The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a thriller-as-thesis statement exploring the mental illness versus demonic possession question and came out on the side of ambiguity and general tolerance of other people’s spiritual beliefs. That film, goofy as it was, works better than Deliver Us From Evil, which nosedives into overstatement and can’t resist a protracted operatic demon-outing climax that strains the “actual accounts” claim well past its breaking point.

Still, I feel friendly toward Evil. Derrickson’s a rare bird, both a true believer and a young director trying to navigate Hollywood—he’s said to be helming a Doctor Strange adaptation next. I think this film could have used more of the believer and less of the showman, but at least it keeps a sense of humour about itself, particularly with regards to its winking references to Poltergeist and Taxi Driver and a fun motif involving The Doors, whose music seems to follow Sarchie around. People are strange, just like the song says, so why can’t we have a morose Iraq vet-turned-house painter and lion whisperer who recites Latin and goes to work in the middle of the night made up like Alice Cooper?

             

Drag Me to Home Movies

Sinister opens with the image, rendered in faux-Super 8, of four hooded figures hung from a tree in what has just become the Osborne family’s backyard. True crime author Ellison Osborne (Ethan Hawke) is the only one who knows that his family is moving into a crime scene, but for him it’s just business; it’s been ten years since his last bestseller and Ellison figures rooting himself right in the very place where some truly evil shit went down, a large house tucked away in a wood, with no apparent neighbours anywhere in the vicinity, is the surest way to spin literary gold.

But before you can say “Overlook Hotel” the place is already giving off bad vibes: there are exotic pest control issues and things going bump, very loudly, in the night; Ellison’s son is sleepwalking, sleep-contorting and sleep-screaming, while Ellison’s daughter’s painting creepy things on the walls; and there’s a stash of home movies in the attic that each depict some sort of creatively staged mass murder, with hints of occult activity in the margins. Gradually these movies yield more and more glimpses of some shadowy, dark-haired figure in black and white makeup, always lurking in the background—it’s like “Where’s Waldo?” for Goths. And it’s with the emergence of this figure, who comes to be known as Mr. Boogie, that we come to understand that no matter how effectively photographed, nicely paced and well-cast Sinister is, it’s eventually going to get really, really dumb.

The script is from C. Robert Cargill, the direction by Scott Derrickson, who previously brought us The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which I felt somewhat warm toward, and that remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which I don’t think anybody felt anything toward. When you take away all the Mr. Boogie and the demon kiddies and supernatural hokum, the essential story of Sinister isn’t too bad, but the lack of ambiguity and corny special effect bits drain it of all credibility and real suspense, and all the time spent building Ellison’s potent character—he’s at once a loving father and a mercilessly ambitious and frustrated author—ends up being for nothing since the destiny of he and his family has little to do with any character flaws and everything to do with cheap, ultimately nonsensical twists. 

Die, another Day

A famous American once said there’s nothing to fear but fear itself, but fear itself can be pretty goddamned scary. Apparently when Americans feels fear they instinctively resort to blowing shit up, no matter how unbelievably stupid such actions may be. In the new, longer, dumber and duller version of The Day the Earth Stood Still poor old Klaatu the alien gets pumped with lead before he can even get a word out. His people have studied long to understand our earthly ways, but I guess no one ever told them it was dangerous to be in Central Park at night.

Klaatu arrives in a big misty sphere to serve mankind its eviction notice. We’ve abused this planet long enough it seems, and interplanetary real estate’s at a premium, so out we go in a plague of metallic locusts that can chomp through baseball stadiums without stopping for a breather. Unless of course, like Ebenezer Scrooge, we can convince our executioner of our capacity for change.

After Klaatu busts out of his placenta suit and absconds, rather implausibly, from the military facility where he’s being prodded, he spends a little time on our company. Disguised as Keanu Reeves in a suit—is this really the most inconspicuous shape he could think to assume?—he liaisons with astrophysicist Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly). She gives him a lift to some state park where more alien spheres lay waiting to get their Armageddon on. From there it’s off to the home of a Nobel-prize winning biologist (John Cleese) where Klaatu hears Bach. It’s beautiful, he says with genuine awe. Somebody take this guy to a record store! We could speed things along with some Procol Harum.

If the aliens really do come and threaten to kill us all it would certainly not be advisable to show them this movie. Klaatu can resuscitate the dead, make helicopters smash into each other, create ear-piercing noises and get tuna sandwiches out of the vending machines for free—he’s not going to be impressed by these lame special effects, the pointless artificial camera swoops around cars and poorly matched green-screening. He might have a soft spot for kids, granted, but Helen’s stepson is so relentlessly annoying that such a gambit seems doomed to backfire. Helen herself is a total fox, but Klaatu’s libido has apparently been Zenned into submission. So yeah, it’s pretty much hopeless.

The new Day is just as didactic as the old one while lacking all of its fun. Yet director Scott Derrickson seems uninterested in fun anyway. His apocalypse is boring, the overwhelming loss flatly abstract, the menace bland, the story needlessly padded. The original film’s spectral spookiness has been traded in for murky imagery and boilerplate design. Reeves doesn’t help much either. The single thing he needs to do here is change his mind, yet he can’t quite manage it. If they needed a supernaturally handsome, seemingly enlightened but nonetheless otherly-looking famous person to play Klaatu couldn’t they have got Richard Gere? How about David Byrne? Better yet, why not Al Gore? Give him a little software, set him up in Times Square and Bob’s your uncle.