After watching "Devil's Due," I still won't agree that the genre is dead, but it sure does have a nasty head cold.
For found footage to work, it needs continuity. Quality actors are not important, they're supposed to be real people so it's OK if they're a few Walkens short of a quality performance.
This movie is a giant mess. It starts out as a video diary of newlyweds and then pretty much shits the bed in the first 15 minutes. A honeymoon turns into some sort of satanic ritual where the camera turns itself on and off and the bride gets knocked up with the spawn of Satan.
Of course weird shit starts happening and everyone dismisses it as hormones. The Great Hormones of Babylon maybe.
Apparently, the production team couldn't figure out how to keep the hand held cam thing going so a gaggle of devil worshiping squatters break in and plant 16 freaking surveillance cameras without being noticed to keep track of the parents-to-be.
We watch the family go through a bunch of weird shit. Then the awesome Sam Anderson from Justified shows up, gets a nosebleed and starts ranting about the book if 1st John from his hospital bed. *shrug*
Now here is where it gets really bad. We are confronted with footage of three teenagers who come across the vegetarian mother of all evil eating a dead deer in the woods. The teens get tossed around like and it's almost like a prankster edited in an outtake reel from "Chronicle." Mix in a bad rip off of the final scene of the first clip of V/H/S 1 and the capacity for sucking grows exponentially.
I won't throw in any more spoilers but the last 15 minutes may become an audio/visual aid in a community college "How Not To Make A Shitty Movie 101" course.
The movie is not completely bad. There is an adorable Golden Retriever who can catch a ball in his mouth after only 2 tries.
** out of ***** only because of the dog and the fact I reserve one-star ratings for Baz Luhrmann projects
