Joel McHale is in Deliver Us From Evil. Anyone who's seen the TV show Community will immediately recognise him as its protagonist, Jeff Winger. For a show built upon the idea of breaking down and parodying genre, it's more than a little ironic that in Deliver Us From Evil, he plays the wise-cracking cop sidekick with a death clock above his head so straightfaced. Perhaps if the movie had at least a degree of self-awareness, it would have been digestible. But it approaches its watered-down stereotypes with such conviction in the hope that on premise alone, it's a success. Rather than build upon the strengths of its genres, it falls entirely on their tropes. Three soldiers read some Latin on a wall in Iraq and bring a demon back to New York, which proceeds to spread the word and murder some folk. Police officer Eric Bana is put on the investigation, and he just so happens to have lost his faith, so of course he doesn't believe in any of this "exorcist mumbo jumbo crap". You can see the end of the film as soon as it begins, and predictability is an instant killer in mystery and horror movies. The thing is, if it sought to examine or deconstruct the tropes inherent to these genres, it could have been great. But there's a scene in which Eric Bana goes to see one of the possessed, who's been locked in a jail cell marked "Crazy Person". She's clearly under the influence of something other than your run-of-the-mill heroins. Her eyes are not a human colour, her face makes scurvy look like a mild skin condition and she keeps drooling a thick, goopy, grey liquid. Her voice is not a human voice. There is something clearly and obviously not human about her. But Eric Bana is completely shocked when she flips out and bites a chunk out of his arm. When he's the only one noticing flash images of bleeding people and the sound of children laughing when he and his partner are viewing CCTV footage and he doesn't immediately assume something supernatural is afoot, it's all serving to make its reliance on stale genre all the more apparent.
It's not entirely without merit, however. The demon is a huge fan of The Doors, for one. It exclusively uses the lyrics and music of Jim Morrison and Co. to screw with Eric Bana, at times to genuinely unsettling effect, so if you find yourself wishing you were stubbing your toe on a corner repeatedly rather than watch this piece of trash, you can ease the pain a little with the knowledge that there's a good song just around the corner. Also, bizarrely, the third act of the movie is really good. And that's not by comparison. It's the one moment during the whole film that the merging of both genres is done to good effect. The main possessed man spends most of the film possessing others, wearing hoodies and taunting Eric Bana's daughter by scratching her floorboards. And then a traditional haunted house scene of objects acting independently is punctuated with a home invasion and kidnapping. This is followed by a scene in which the spooky dude is standing ready and waiting in Eric Bana's home, making delicious dark threats. His body is covered in phrases and symbols scratched into his skin. And Eric Bana finally realises that in his disbelief, he is powerless, and he lashes out violently. Something snapped in my head and I realised I was enjoying it. This is followed by the film's climax: a step-by-step, true to life walkthrough of an exorcism that mirrors a cop drama's interrogation scene. The exorcist explains all of the different stages they will go through, and they proceed to do just that. He taunts the demon, the demon taunts back, it gets violent, he gets the demon's name and with that, expulsion. In the same way that a cop and his suspect trade veiled threats that escalate to violence, until the cop gets his information - the name of a demon, in this case. And then the movie ends. It's not often that a film's last third redeems its first two, and it certainly doesn't here, but if you make the mistake of sitting down to this cinematic turd, rest assured you can wake up in the last half hour.
All of this is to say if you can even be bothered to sit down to it in the first place. Don't mistake my praise for an overall statement of enjoyment. I did not enjoy Deliver Us From Evil. It's the worst thing you can say about a film: it's boring. Films regularly take dull topics and present them in a way that defies our preconceived notions and alters our perceptions. Deliver Us From Evil doesn't care enough about you to even try. It's a cop drama that forgot to include a mystery. It's a horror movie that forgot to include scares. Or maybe it's choosing not to, in the hopes that its defying genre to blaze a new trail. But its not pulling from what makes genre effective. Scenes begin to generate classic horror movie tension only to punctuate them with a dull cop cliche. Take the aforementioned home invasion scene: Eric Bana's daughter is awoken by scratching on the ground. Her toy owl begins to roll across the floor on its own, occasionally stopping to stare at her and hoot. The door slams shut. This should be building to something other than a jerk in a hoodie standing in a hallway. They don't even bother to put a loud noise on the soundtrack to at least get a jolt from the audience. Because Law & Order wouldn't. But Law & Order isn't about fucking demons. When the end of a so-called horror film's second act is a knife fight in a stairwell between a muscled-up douchebag and a red-eyed monster man, that's the cue to vow never to watch an "Inspired by true events" horror movie again, get up, walk out and salvage what's left of your Sunday afternoon with something a little less moronic. It's what Eric Bana would want you to do.
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