HERE COMES THE DEVIL

Stars: Francisco Barreiro, Laura Caro, Alan Martinez, Michele Garcia, Giancarlo Ruiz, David Arturo Cabezud, Enrique Saint-Martin and Michele Estrada.
Writer/Director: Adrian Garcia Bogliano.

Rating: 2.5/5

It exudes an effective creepiness and a free-wheeling attitude to both hot and horrible sexuality, but Adrian Garcia Bogliano’s bad-seed opus Here Comes The Devil doesn’t amount to much more than a stylish ode to 70’s giallo-esque excess.

Mashing up elements from staples such as The Hills Have Eyes, Don’t Look Now, Village of the Damned and Carrie without adding anything particularly fresh, Bogliano’s intention seems to be to make everything that is old new again. Via the washed-out palette and overactive zooming lens of DOP Ernesto Herrera and occasionally histrionic emoting from his lead thesps, the well-established and regarded auteur (most recently, a contributor to the cult hit, The ABCs of Death) harkens back to a grindhouse aesthetic that dwells seedily on nudity and cheap shocks.

Bogliano puts you in the mood for an entirely different type of exploitation pic with his pre-credit sequence. A particularly rigorous bout of lady-love that culminates in a speech about guilt and regret soon turns a different type of nasty when a rampaging serial killer knocks at the door and dismembers one of the girls. The other fights back, sending the killer running to the nearby hills.

Post-credits, a family outing turns sour when mum Sol (Laura Caro) and dad Felix (Francisco Barreiro) have to deal first with their daughter Sara’s (Michele Garcia) bloody on-set of womanhood and then the disappearance of her and her brother, Adolfo (Alan Martinez) in the hills where the killer died. Caro and Barreiro are afforded a complexity that is not otherwise apparent in Bogliano’s script; their opening scenes veer from casual familiarity to dirty-minded heavy-petting to bitter mutual hatred.

Despite the hills being familiar to the locals as a place of supernatural goings-on, all are happy when the kids are found safely. Bogliano then splits his narrative between a horrible act of revenge that soon seems unfounded and a dawning awareness about what may be the possession and resurrection of the children’s souls. There is a thematic under-pinning concerning the impending adulthood of late teenagers and its terrifying impact upon the parents who are about to lose their babies to life, but Bogliano handles these elements with a less assured touch than he does the horror-film flourishes.

Slasher film tropes manifest in the form of David Arturo Cabezud’s intellectually  disabled loner Lucio and know-it-all gas station owner Enrique Saint-Martin, neither of whom develop past the usual shallowness found amongst support parts in US B-movies. Bogliano indulges in some psychedelic surrealism to impress upon us his trippy influences, but it amounts to a lot of effort for very little advancing of the story.

Strongest contributions are most evident from below-the-line talents like sound designer Lex Ortega, who crafts a complex audio-scape of screams, creaks and shrieks, and makeup artist Rosario Araque, who makes believable earth-bound ghouls when required.