Review: HERE COMES THE DEVIL

Here Comes the Devil
Directed by Adrián García Bogliano
97 minutes
2012
In Theaters and On Demand


I recently sat down with John and watched the interesting yet flawed Mexican horror film Here Comes the Devil. What could have been a stereotypical film about demonic possession turned into an intriguing, puritanical look at sex.

The basic premise of the film is a vacationing family stops at a gas station next to a large weird hill. The two kids in the family (sister and brother) want to go explore the hill and the parents let them go. Unfortunately, the kids go into a creepy vagina looking tunnel and disappear for a night, much to the parents displeasure of course. They turn up the next morning but they’ve changed. They are creepy-as-fuck, lifeless bastards. The father is an asshole so he doesn’t notice but the mother begins to notice right away and that’s when things get fucked up.

This film looks at sex as a major sin. The movie starts off with two lesbians grinding cooters like there’s no tomorrow. Once they’ve finished, they sit and discuss the fact that one of them feels extremely guilty for the banging the happened moments ago. This is all cut short when a person begins pounding on their front door. The one that doesn’t feel guilty gets up to answer and is promptly greeted by a psycho who beats her up and cuts off a couple of her fingers. The guilt ridden lesbian runs downstairs and hits the maniac who then runs off and dies in the aforementioned vagina cave. A strange scene but one that really does set the tone of the film, sex and brutal violence. There’s just all sorts of weird extremely sexual moments in this movie and they have this ultimate feeling of perversion. Sex in this movie leads to guilt, perversion, rage and ultimately damnation.

Pictured: creepy-as-fuck, lifeless bastards

I really wasn’t sure how I felt about the movie while I was viewing it, then it took a glorious and ultra violent turn for the better. I’m not going to ruin the moment for you if you end up seeing this film but it changes the tone of the film for the better and creates a more compelling storyline for the characters of the parents.

At moments Here Comes the Devil felt like a grindhouse film with some fun extreme camera zooms and of course the massive amounts of perversion prevalent throughout but it never quite got to that grindhouse fun/extreme quality that makes them so enjoyable. With the amount of weird sexual shit in this movie I feel like it should have been titled Here CUMS the Devil. Overall, I think this movie had some really good moments but ended up falling flat on a lot of notes. That being said, it was more interesting than many American horror films out today and worthy of at least one viewing.

-T. Reinert