![]() (Horror movies are a kind of comfort food, after all.) Last year’s The Conjuring breathed new life into these old tropes by giving us victims we cared about, and by focusing as much on suspense as it did on scares. Of course, one man’s horror cliché is another’s horror tradition, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a movie that relies on reliable scare tactics. And a de rigueur climactic exorcism that looks like all the other exorcisms. Other typical elements abound, including a creepy music box, doors that close of their own will, and scratching noises under children’s beds. (It certainly helps that whatever sinister power is causing these people to do horrific things also makes the lights go out whenever it’s near.) There are animals galore: lions, bears, owls, fish, a screeching cat (of course), a mouse caught in a trap, and a big-ass dog that apparently likes to sit quietly in the darkness until juuust the right moment to start barking maniacally. There’s promise in these atmospheric early scenes, when Sarchie, alongside his partner (a surprisingly buff Joel McHale) and occasionally Mendoza, rushes bravely into unlit basements or looks down pitch-black corridors or leaps into a lion’s den at night. “I guess I outgrew all that,” the tough cop reflects. Father Mendoza then enters the picture, and begins to make solemn pronouncements about “primary evil” and “secondary evil,” and playfully shames Sarchie for his abandonment of the church. After Sarchie investigates several seemingly unconnected incidents - including one in which a woman tossed her infant into the lion’s den at the Bronx Zoo - he begins to realize that the events might be connected. Spoiler alert, but true evil turns out to be lurking around the corner. “Then you haven’t seen true evil,” the priest replies. “I’ve seen horrible things, but nothing that can’t be explained by human nature,” he tells Jesuit priest Mendoza, played by Edgar Ramirez. ![]() But he himself isn’t much of a believer in the supernatural. Sarchie, we’re told, is known for his “radar” - a clairvoyant’s ability to sense when something is worth looking into. ![]() In Scott Derrickson’s latest film (he also directed Sinister and The Exorcism of Emily Rose), we follow tough, cynical cop Sarchie (Eric Bana) as a series of increasingly creepy occurrences in the Bronx open his eyes to the fact that demons are real and that he needs to get good with God. Call me crazy, but “the actual accounts of NYPD sergeant Ralph Sarchie” (from which Deliver Us from Evil was purportedly derived) sound an awful lot like every other horror movie ever made. ![]()
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