Hostel: Part III

Director: Scott Spiegel (2011)

Starring: Ed Helms, Bradley Cooper, Kip Pardue, Brian Hallisay

Find it: IMDB

Men on a stag party in Las Vegas run into trouble when one of their number goes missing. They attempt to retrace the previous evening's footsteps in the hope of recovering their disappeared compatriot. By the end of it, a punch in the chops from Mike Tyson is going to be the least of their worries. "Not much of a party," says an observant hooker of the group's crappy stag do. Not much of a party indeed. In relocating the Hostel Hostel to Las Vegas, this threequel loses a lot of the franchise's Eastern European creepiness and just feels like an episode of CSI.

Instead of the torture being a private affair between torturer and tortured, Hostel 3 turns it into a group exercise in which rich bastards bet upon the variables of violence. One game has the participants attempting to guess how long it will take for a character to give the "I have a wife and kids" speech. It's an interesting concept, but beyond that one game, it's barely touched on again. Another game sees the rich bitches guessing how many arrows a character will take to the body before he dies. It's hardly a game of chance though, since the killer then goes and shoots him in the face. The bad guys in Hostel III are essentially John Cleese in Rat Race, taken to the extreme.

There is some amusement to be found in the movie's first half, which playfully and continuously toys with the audience's expectations. Some of the red herrings there are strikingly predictable (the opening, for example) but others work well. But the problem with all of the Hostel films is that once the action reaches the torture basements, there's nowhere left to go. Like part 1 and 2, Hostel III blows its load three quarters of the way through, and has to make with a predictable and passionless escape sequence, just for convention's sake.

It helps not a jot that the characters are mostly terrible. The lead character (Hallisay) is a blank slate; supposed to be sympathetic and relateable because he treats prostitutes like people and won't cheat on his fiancée (again). Best man Carter (Pardue) is just as much a nonentity. John Hensley looks like Ant or Dec from off've Ant or Dec and hits a man with his crutch. To be fair, he's the least punchable person in the film. But there's little schadenfreude to seeing them die, since the torture scenes are dull too.

The concept is interesting, the set-up fun, and Hostel III does have its moments - there are more ball gags than you could fill a ball gag ball bag with - but mostly it's silly, needless and plays like a rip-off of itself. The build-up is well done, but the action within the Hostel is boring and graceless. It's the least gruesome entry so far. You may be better off staying on the hotel roof instead.

The Devil Inside

Director: William Brent Bell (2012)

Starring: Fernanda Andrade, Simon Quartermain, Suzan Crowley

Find it: IMDB

Seeing a movie on the big screen with a large audience, can vastly improve the moviegoing experience. It's been suggested that my indifference to Insidious was because I saw that on a tiny television screen, alone. And thanks to its audience, I could've sworn blind that Spider-Man 3 was a good movie. In the case of The Devil Inside, the entire audience were laughing their collective and individual arses off. I laugh at most horror, but this is one of the few times everyone else in the room has joined me in a cheeky LOL (the other times usually having something to do with a Night Shyamalan).

The Devil Inside starts off pretending to be a documentary (with talking heads and everything) and then descends into being the Paranormal Activity rip-off it is at heart. Isabella Rossi (Andrade) and documentary maker Michael (Ionut Grama) travel to Italy to investigate a crime her mother committed years ago, during an exorcism gone wrong. Isabella's priest friends determine that Mother is still possessed. They invite her to join them in a series of unauthorised exorcisms. Meanwhile, the funniest demonic horror movie since Repossessed.

There's a scene in which one of the priests baptises a baby 'John Thomas'. Calling your newborn son John Thomas is only marginally more acceptable than calling it Richard Head. And during the possession scenes, there's some brilliant swearing. But demonic swearing only works if your movie is actually scary. And since The Devil Inside is fairly incompetent in its horror, the swearing just comes across as hilarious filth; the sort of thing you'd see scripted in a Todd Phillips movie.

There's some nearly scary stuff (all in the trailer, mind). Suzan Crowley does bug-eyed well. I even jumped once (at the cheapest scare, involving a dog). And Italy looks nice. The Devil Inside is essentially a found footage version of The Rite, rite down to an act of violence committed upon an unsuspecting child. But beyond its two fairly impressive exorcism scenes, the rest of the film makes little sense. The last quarter has the urgency of [REC] without any of the scares and too much predictability. It becomes completely manic, over the top and incredibly implausible. There's demonic transference and then there's taking the piss. Kitchen sink transference. It's not remotely believable as a faux-documentary or otherwise, and the ending is just as bad as everyone says it is.

Going in with very low expectations, I enjoyed The Devil Inside. It's a hilarious movie up until you realise that by paying to see it, you're keeping a cynical half-arsed approach to filmmaking in business.