South African indie director Orr, with a few horror movies under his belt, comes at us with one he described (in an interview) as being out of the ordinary, not exactly was you expect. I suppose he was trying to be creative in his story choices but just came off with a bunch of WTFs.
We start with Hazel, waking up up in a shredded shirt and a back covered in burn scars. Enter tragic backstory which doesn't matter all that much. She is the leader of a snatch crew, criminals who scope out and kidnap rich kids, ransoming them back to their wealthy parents. At first I thought they might be hired by her parents, to get her back from an Evil Cult. But no, they are just a bunch of thugs seeking to make money.
The first hiccup in the plot was that they spent 6 weeks prepping the job but never seemed to catch on that something hinky was up. The prep is supposed to imply watching schedules, noting patterns and setting up a base of operations. Other than the installation of some camera equipment in an abandoned warehouse, they didn't seem to have prepped at all, because were they very surprised about what actually happened during those six weeks.
The actual kidnapping is pretty easy, grabbing the girl from her bedroom in a rather creepy old house. There are also some triggers for us to catch on to something occult going on. With the girl back at the warehouse, we see she is not quite right. And thus begins a pretty ho hum Evil Spirit story.
Ho hum would have been fine, but the movie just goes all over the place, from bad to worse. There is a segment in the middle, the part of many films where we get a dramatic view from a camcorder. If the rest of the movie was low key indie, this segment was downright amateurish, almost film school / YouTube level of acting and plot. This shows us how Rich Girl became Possessed Girl, all during those six weeks that our crew was supposed to be paying attention.
From Evil Spirit in an Evil House we are exposed to some sort of Old One style demon from whom the Vatican protects us via a magic book supposedly written by God himself. If you are going to have a talisman that protects our world, locking it away in the Vatican seems foolish. The house (on Willow Street, but seriously, who cares what street it is on) is supposed to be as far away from the book's location as possible, which gives the demon some leeway. Someone writing the movie should have Googled antipodal locations. Unless Willow Street is off the coast of New Zealand, it ain't that far away. Also, the Vatican KNOWS this location, so how about just purchasing the land and establishing a watch base?
Ignoring that, the demon needs to attain four souls to become all powerful. So then, why has that been so hard? If its been hanging around that point on the planet since the beginning of human kind, why does it keep messing up? In fact, what is supposed to be the classic list of Evil Things That Have Happened (in the house) over history just sounds like a list of all the times the demon has failed. With no one's intervention required. Even this time, when he converts two of the snatch crew into creaking, cracking hentai-tongued Possessed, he cannot do much more than some low key TK. So much for All Powerful.
The thing chases down Hazel, the last of the crew, to make her the fourth. But she gets helped by an eye-rolling twist. But by the time we got to the twist, I was so bored and annoyed, I didn't really care. And neither should you. Decent poster though...
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