Here Comes The Devil: 16 of 31 Horror Movies I've Never Seen

Mexican cinema has it's fair share of dark subject matter.  Though most of the films that make their way to the States are comedies or drama's, occasionally a nice little shocker slips through the cracks and finds it's way to American distribution channels.  One such film is 2012's Here Comes The Devil, a recent take on the demonic possession genre, with a couple of added twists.

The film opens with a hot and heavy lesbian sex scene that displaces the mood, immediately taking the audience of guard.  Then, as should probably be expected of a shock film, there is a violent home invasion moment where a man starts to beat one of the girls to death, taking a few of her fingers with his machete.  Her lover, manages to dispatch the killer with a blow to the head and he runs away up a nearby hill before the story inexplicable shifts location almost entirely.

We then center on a small family on a day out together.  The two kids decide to climb a hill, that looks awfully similar to the hill from the opening sequence of the film, and while the parents get down and dirty in their car (ya know, to pass time) it becomes apparent that the kids are not returning any time soon.  Now we have the fear setting in on the parents as they have to spend a tense night in a hotel before a search can be conducted in the morning.  To their surprise, they are greeted at the hotel by a police officer with the kids.  Everything seems normal at first, but as the story unravels there is something definitely wrong with the children, and the conclusion is both shocking and off putting to say the least.

The film runs the gamete of tricks to mess with the audience, sound and light gags, strange bruise make up, etc, but what was very interesting and refreshing about the film was the structure of the story.  Typically, it seems that parents in films like this ignore the signs that something may be very wrong until it jumps up and bites them in the ass.  In this film, the parents actively try to discover what may have happened to their kids, first assuming that they may have been sexually assaulted by a local idiot, before the supernatural explanation becomes more and more plausible.  It's gives the film the feel of a mystery, with plenty of dashes of sexually charged shock imagery involving various taboos from demonic rape, incest, and other such violence.

My main qualm with the film is that it's look and feel was a bit cheap on the whole, belying a small budget, but what they did with the story made up pretty well.  The two child actors are creepy as all hell and the parents dynamic worked well.  The telenovella acting style of the gentleman playing the detective was a bit off putting to me, but again the story was intriguing enough for me to forgive it.  Overall, the movie was just the right kind of entertainingly screwed up for me to recommend it for a watch!  Not great, but not bad either.

3 out of 5 skulls.