Deliver Us From Evil (2014)

I tried watching this movie a few months ago and was promptly possessed by the demon of boredom, who forced unholy yawns out of my unhinged jaw and shouted profane insults at the screen from time to time (mostly "You suck!" and "Get interesting, you fucker!"). After a successful nap exorcism, I have returned, triumphant, to conquer this film once and for all.

Deliver Us From Evil 
Year released: 2014
Starring: Eric "Black Hawk Down" Bana, that Scottish guy who always plays an emaciated creep, Olivia Munn, some other people.
Directed by: The guy who did Sinister, which I quite liked.
Based on the book by Ralph Sarchie, retired NYPD, whose book of the same title was a collection of case files, not all of which I agreed with or even necessarily believed in, but which were fun to read.

And really, if this thing didn't star Eric Bana, a man I've lusted after since 2001, I probably wouldn't be giving it a second chance.

So, here we are in Iraq, 2010, because as we all know, all of the evil in the world is conveniently located in Iraq and its neighboring Muslim countries, because all Muslims are terrorists and all terrorists are Muslim and HezbollahBokoHaremalQaeda blahblahblah Thanks Obama, etc etc etc. Anyway, some soldiery guys wander into a cave and get attacked by something we can't see whilst staring at a wall inscribed with Arabic script which we also can't see.

Fast forward three years and now we're in Noo Yawk.
Look, I have proof:

Is anyone really welcome in The Bronx?

So after a tough night delivering dead baby carcasses to the county coroner, Ralph and his partner amble over to the Bronx Zoo and stupidly wander into the lion paddock in search of a Juggalo. Apparently, this is the scene that inspired the equally stupid scene in Jurassic World where our dubious heroes wander into the Indominus Rex paddock. Anywho, they arrest some schized out scab-bag playing in the dirt and arrest her, figuring she's whacked to the gills on drugs. Some hot, sweaty, rugged young Jesuit shows up and claims responsibility for her. Turns out she tossed her toddler into the lion pit earlier that day and may have been prompted to do so by some dude named Santino, aka the Juggalo, aka, the Scottish guy who always plays a creep, aka one of the soldiers who was in Iraq.

Slip in some sunsplashed footage of Ralph and his impossibly beautiful wife watching their angelic daughter play soccer, and then back to the precinct.

Ralph and his Red Sox loving, one-liner chucking pahd'neh respond to a call about strange noises in a house. The couple who live there don't speak English so their kid translates.

Also, Ralph doesn't like cats. Which makes Ralph an asshole in my opinion, but whatever.

Anyway, lets go down to the spooky, stinky basement where all the scary noises seem to be coming from, and hey there's no lights down there and I know what lets do! Let's rip off the scene from John Carpenter's The Fog and have a corpse plop out of the wall behind Ralph and go BOOGA BOOGA! It's a nice, fetid, ripeass corpse too, swollen with decay and bursting with blowflies who rip out of its eyeballs and abdomen and looks really icky.  Turns out he's one of the guys from the pre-credit sequence who was down dicking around in an Iraqi cave looking for weapons of mass destruction or some such shit.

Oh look, Ralph's hatred of cats is finally personified:

This is found nailed to the wall of Dead Fly Guy's abandoned apartment, which is strewn with garbage, religious paraphernalia and a really pissed off doberman which is thrown into our face as a cheap jumpscare.

Ralph goes home, finds out his wife is pregnant and none too happy about his job. Also, his goldfish aren't too happy with the newest addition to the tank and, as Ralph watches in horror, they go piranha all over its ass and rip it to shreds. Cue ominous, foreboding music: the demons are coming for Ralph and his sugar cookie family.

So there's one more soldier left from Iraq that Ralph and his partner think may be the one responsible for the deaths. Meanwhile, Ralph goes home and yells at his wife and kid. Ralph moseys on back to the scene of a domestic dispute, where the first soldier (not the blowfly guy and not the Scottish creep) beat the shit out of his wife, stabbed Ralph and took off for parts unknown. Ralph finds this scrawled all over the guys wall:

What does it mean? Who knows and who cares? But suddenly, that stuffed owl toy that his wife bought for their daughter inexplicably becomes a catalyst for lots of evil devil Satan things. Shit, guess I'd better throw out those twenty year old troll dolls on my bookshelf before the movie Troll Hunter comes to life and my life is invaded by farting mountain trolls.

Finally, Ralph finds the videotape from the trios excursion into that Iraqi cave and makes a terrible discovery:

Santino has become the lead singer of Gorgoroth!

Ralph hasn't learned jack shit from his experience in the lions den. He bumbles off to the loony bin to visit Miss Scabby VonDroolFace, hoping she'll know where Santino is. In the process he pulls up an image of the Latin graffiti he found and brilliantly sticks his arm between the bars of her cell, hoping she'll have a reaction to the sight. And she does. And fucking bites his arm. Duh.

At this point, I feel I must point out the fact that none of this shit happened in the book, so I'm not entirely sure that the "based on a true story" shit is legit here.

Anyway, blahblahblah, crazy girl escapes, yaddayaddayadda, Santino kidnaps Ralph's wife and kid, blahblahblah exorcism scene, yakyakyak everyone is saved and God wins and Ralph's wife pops out another kid and they all live happily ever after, the end. Oh, and they get rid of that stupid demonic stuffed owl toy, the end.

The final verdict: forty minutes longer than it needed to be, a half step up from the cornball efforts of Insidious and The Conjuring, and not at all frightening. Cartoonish, childish and a waste of Bana's talent. This isn't even a movie, it's just another episode in the neverending show that is BluePrint Horror, following the same, tired out formula that just about every major horror release in the last 10 years have followed to the proverbial T.

This isn't Van Gogh, guys. It's a cheap Paint-By-Numbers.