In my scant research before writing this review, I came across this story from Deadline announcing the writer/director duo of the Vang Brothers new feature, Bedeviled, “described as a cross between Spike Jonze’s Her and Stephen King’s It.” They are not household names but the brothers have directed a couple features and shorts that show these aren’t fly-by-night con-men who talked their way onto a stuido lot.
Similarly, you might think Bedeviled is a micro-budget film filled with no-name actors playing characters 10 years younger than they are. But while I had no recognition of any of the actors, collectively they have quite a few big-ish projects between them like the Poltergeist remake, Ouija: Origin of Evil, and the ongoing From Dusk til Dawn series. And with only a few exceptions, the acting is ... competent. There’s not much to write home about on that front but most everyone, especially the lead Saxon Sharbino is a step-up from most cheesy direct-to-video horror films.
Even the opening scene featuring Alexis G. Zall’s Nikki perusing a creepy, dimly-lit house raised my expectations as it was lit and shot very well with a real sense of unease until Mr. Bedeviled (or whatever, we’ll cover this) suddenly pops into the frame and Nikki screams, signaling her demise. If only this great little scene set the tone for the rest of the film, we’d be alright. Alas, here we are.
After the great opening, we meet Nikki’s friends including Sharbino’s Alice who are all coming to terms with her death. Things are left purposefully vague but we eventually learn she died of a heart attack with no preexisting condition to explain. Shortly after, all her friends receive an invitation for an app called Bedeviled: a personal assistant like Siri we are told with a bit of an attitude. Oh yeah, and the invitations came from Nikki’s phone!!!
The next 50-some minutes of this film are the kids learning about the app, getting a really on-point lecture from a teacher about the psychological effects of being afraid, and then running across possible hallucinations of things that scare them like clowns, or a demented teddy bear, or a sad old woman from an Asian village. This movie really spins its wheels until the first death outside of the opening (again nearly an hour into it) and then just repeats the formula until there’s only Alice and friend Cody left.
We created a character like Hannibal Lector and The Joker, but in a supernatural film. We’re reinventing the bogeyman with this app,” added Burlee Vang about the plot.
I can understand where the filmmakers are coming from in their desire to update slasher films for the new generation but this does not work here. For one, in spite of the movie being rated R, we see exactly zero deaths onscreen. A few of the kids have some decent run-ins with their “fear” but whenever the soon-to-be victim is about to be dispatched, something just suddenly pops into frame, they scream, and then someone finds the body. There’s no blood, no gore, and considering that the movie sets up that these kids are all being “scared to death,” there’s really no innovation.
Though there is some attempted explanation to the hows and whys of this happening delivered by Cody, the tech guru apparently, it doesn’t register beyond the killer basically being a demon summonded into one’s life with the app and then it kills you. No, you can’t just uninstall the app and even if you stomp on your phone, the app will fix it? No one tried throwing their phone into a volcano or giving it to an annoying young sibling so I can’t speak to those options either. I can’t even recall the killer being given a name so I’ll just go with Mr. Bedeviled.
Bedeviled isn’t great cinema by any means. There are definitely some bright spots even if the filmmakers’ rely way too much on random jump scares and some of the cast is decent. But I’m not sure there is enough meat on the bones of this story (at least this iteration) to fill an entire feature length film. This could totally be rejiggered as an X-Files episode to it’s benefit. Or, just expand the excellence of the opening scece into a short and call it a day.
Mr. Bedeviled, you should have waited for update 2.1.
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