Starring: Eric Bana, Édgar Ramírez, Sean Harris, Olivia Munn
Director: Scott Derrickson
Genre: Crime, horror
Running time: 118 minutes
Now showing at: Cinema Magic, Metroplex Mall Naalya; Century Cinemax, Accacia Mall, Kisementi
Silent darkness and then eerie sounds and the grotesque image of a man with bloody marks all over his body –this is the stuff horror movies are made of. And while Deliver Us From Evil has its share of them, it is more than just a horror movie.
Based on the police files of Ralph Sarchie, when he was a detective with the New York Police Department, the movie combines crime drama and the paranormal. On what is supposed to be a routine investigation into a woman wandering about at the zoo, Sarchie (Bana) is drawn into the world of people being possessed. The woman seems mentally disturbed and is therefore thrown into the loony bin only for a priest, Mendoza, to say the woman is possessed by the devil.
Of course Sarchie treats it with the cynicism of a person who has seen too much human evil on the streets to attribute it to an otherworld evil. But when it turns out there is a whole group of people with similar possessions, he can’t ignore it and we are drawn into a world of exorcism and good fighting evil.
This is one of those horrors which, despite the gruesome scenes, doesn’t scare as much as it should, especially if you have watched The Exorcism of Emily Rose. This was another of Derrickson’s movies so you get the feeling that he has a thing for exorcism. But that doesn’t mean he has mastered it. The movie relies heavily on visual effects, lighting and sound. It incorporates all the sounds we have come to associate with horror movies for instance Pop Goes The Weasel and the theme from The Addams Family. And to clinch the clichéd music, it also features a lot of rock music.
The most exciting thing about that this movie is that it is based on a real person’s experience –a person who quit his detective work to become an exorcist.
