All that film, all those hamboigahs!
If there’s one thing I’ve learned here over the course of How About Notflix, it’s this; Tom Hanks is an asshole. No wait, that was supposed to be for a different review. Where are my cards? Ah, here we go. If there’s one thing I’ve learned here at How About Notflix, it’s this; I have irreversibly ruined my algorithm for movies. And I’m not specifically talking about Tubi, a dumping ground for the biggest losers in cinema, plus any old movie that charges under ten dollars for syndication. Everywhere I go my recommended movie feed is complete trash, and the worst part about it is that it’s completely self-inflicted and deserved. Because while I don’t like those films, I can’t deny that I watch them. A lot. Readers of this website will know.
It’s a disease that I constantly keep infecting myself with. On the plus side, I have Toffifay this time around. I love Toffifay. I also don’t watch Asylum films, which is the cinematic version of unironically jacking it to one of Woodrocket’s porn parodies. It’s like AA keeping Z-list “celebrities” out of rehab for another week by keeping their minds off of booze and black tar heroin.
The Devil’s Child is a perfect Tubi movie; there’s no Wikipedia page, only one critic review on Rotten Tomatoes, zero audience reviews, and shockingly 310 ratings on IMDB. The main character has fourth place billing underneath two characters that are in the film for a whole five minutes, yet are the only two actors with photographs on their IMDB profiles. If I hadn’t known any better, I’d assume the director got most of the cast off Craigslist. The old man is played by German Naranjo, and I have to wonder if as a theater actor who has been in that trade for over 40 years he did something to stop IMDB from adding him to the credits list.
It may not surprise you that The Devil’s Child is absolute trash. Directed by David Bohorquez whose career is almost entirely music videos, The Devil’s Child is a horror movie where Cherry (Maria Camila Perez) takes a job as a nurse looking after a catatonic old man with a skin condition that does not allow him to be out in the light. Given the lengthy scenes where a character is doing something while blissfully unaware they are being observed by another person just out of view, the only question this movie answers is what is in David Bohorquez’s porn collection.
The camera was the weirdest part of the film, everything feels like it’s shot in halfway fisheye lens and it doesn’t look right. The actors mostly feel like they don’t speak English and are reading their scripts phonetically.
Generally the recipe for a good horror movie is the buildup, you start small and slowly work up the spoopies until the end when the big spoopies happen and the tension really hits its breaking point. The Devil’s Child meanwhile feels like a film where the director shot the first half of about ten different ideas and suddenly realized he was out of budget, having to then stitch together those shots into a full movie out of obligation to a contract with someone who didn’t realize they’d invested in a two-bit hack fraud. There are tons of ideas that go nowhere, concepts that get presented and then never followed up on, character details that lead to nothing, and I’m fairly certain that Francisca Estavez’s character suddenly departs off-screen despite having been abruptly abducted just moments prior because the actress walked off set and they didn’t know how to write it in organically. Maybe she didn’t want a rape scene with lesion guy.
The spoopies in the movie mostly consist of a either the old man or his daughter Naomi (Fiona Horsey) showing the camera that they can make their pupils go blank, like the editor was starting his first job and knew literally one After Effects plugin. He also loves showing people standing in the background as the camera pans who aren’t there when it pans back. Otherwise it’s mostly Cherry passing out in random places around the house, having dreams, and having dreams that compound into other dreams. All of them stupid and boring wastes of time that accomplish nothing.
There’s a weird romance-ish plot between Cherry and the awkward servant Dwayne (Marvens Passiano), also not credited on IMDB, where the two go out in the woods together and Cherry asks to hold his gun before blowing his shot on a rabbit. Shockingly and seemingly out of theme for David Bohorquez, no demons are voyeuristically watching this obvious allegory for sex, and I don’t think the director has the talent to have made that imagery intentionally. I was already confident in Bohorquez’s status as hack fraud director well before the film culminated in a deeply uncomfortable rape scene involving Cherry and the lesion riddled old man and I don’t say uncomfortable because it’s impactful and well-shot, but because it’s your final reminder that David Bohorquez is indeed an asshole. I can understand why German Naranjo probably paid a good amount to keep his name off the IMDB listing, if that is why he’s strangely absent given his face is literally on the cover of the poster and he’s not on the IMDB cast list.
A lot of questions get asked and never answered. It’s obvious Cherry killed a bully in her orphanage and is haunted by the dead girl to this day. But there’s an obvious show that Cherry’s grandmother was the old dude’s wife, meaning the film ends with psychic incest rape followed by Cherry murdering her own grandfather she halfway doesn’t know she’s related to. It’s also pointed out that Naomi can’t have children, so who the hell is Cherry’s mom? The description on IMDB says “Forced to confront her true identity, Cherry makes a decision that will set her upon a collision course with fate, one she won’t ever return from.” None of this ever happens in the film.
I refer to movies as a waste of time, but The Devil’s Child is truly a waste of time. Nothing gets accomplished over the entire film. What is it with shitty Tubi movies and characters being orphans?
Rating: F
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