It Came From FearNet . . . Devour
27 Aug
Devour (2005)
Rated R for violence
Directed by David Winkler
Starring: Jensen Ackles
Shannyn Sossamon
Dominique Swain
William Sadler
Jake Gray (Ackles) heads to class on his 21st birthday after having several disturbing nightmares. He’s had a pretty hard life. His mother was paralyzed in a car accident and his father is a relapsed alcoholic. Currently, he’s putting himself through school working in a strip mall computer repair shop and has a complete jerk of a boss. When his friends Conrad and Dakota (Swain) introduce him to a weird live role-playing game, The Pathway, as an escape, Jake is intrigued. Once someone begins playing The Pathway, they are called on their cell phone and given instructions. Jake is fired because his boss wants to replace him with his fresh-from-jail pot-dealing nephew and he is only too happy to obey the voice on the other end of the line suggesting he gets even.
Things start to look up. His boss is busted by the police for stealing from the store and he meets Marisol (Sossamon), an amateur tarot card reader who also happens to be his mother’s new nurse. The good times don’t last, however, and Jake quickly discovers that The Pathway is all too real when he starts having bizarre hallucinations and his friends turn up dead. He and Marisol must figure out how to stop it before the game kills him too.
It turns out that The Pathway was a gimmick contrived by Satan worshipers specifically to locate Jake. The ending reads like the worst kind of brainstorming session. “What if he’s the son of the Devil and his birth mom was sacrificed after he was born?” “What if there’s an extra twist where is mom wasn’t sacrificed and she IS the Devil?” “Oooh! What if the girl he’s been trying to get with is actually his mom AND the Devil?” “And what if the final twist is that all the events in the movie might be in his head – he killed everyone and there were no Satan worshipers to begin with?!” I imagine there were copious high fives and talk about how Devour was going to be the best horror movie ever, thanks to a not at all ridiculous quadruple twist ending.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the quality of most of the movies I’ve featured in this category, but I was ready for a really bad movie that I could rip to shreds. Devour definitely delivers in that respect.
The storyline feels like they pulled ideas out of a hat and strung them together to create a movie. The deaths are cheesy, the special effects are SciFi Channel movie bad, and the acting is terrible.
My favorite moments:
♥ A grizzled tattoo artist tells Jake he became a Satan worshiper to “get laid”.
♥ In one hallucination, Jake cuts into his tongue – clearly a prop tongue.
♥ Jake’s horrendous orchid tattoo morphs into an equally horrible Satan worshiper tattoo
♥ Jake goes to see a Satanic “consultant” who complains about being underpaid compared to his mechanic who “doesn’t even know how to conjure up Beelzebub”.
Unless you’re weird like me and you enjoy watching terrible horror movies, do yourself a favor and just read the spoilers (if you haven’t already) so you don’t have to put yourself through this torture. If this movie wasn’t straight-to-DVD, it definitely should have been. It’s like someone put The Game and Rosemary’s Baby in a blender and hit frappé – all you’re left with is a sticky, unwatchable mess.
Devour gets a generous 1/2 out of a possible 5 Torgos for being unintentionally hilarious.
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