Devil's Due Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		1.5

Devil's Due Blu-ray Movie Review

Rosemary's boo boo.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 28, 2014

Let’s give credit where credit is due, satanically or otherwise: Devil’s Due is nothing other than a fairly tired rehashing of Ira Levin’s impeccably crafted Rosemary’s Baby. Back in the late sixties when Levin’s novel appeared, it was a media sensation quite unlike anything that had ever hit the best seller charts. Levin miraculously wove that era’s entire zeitgeist, like the infamous Time magazine cover asking “Is God Dead?”, into the story of newlyweds Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse and their sinister neighbors at a tony upper Manhattan apartment house (modeled of course on the Dakota). If you don’t know the “secret” of Rosemary’s Baby, you might want to stop reading now; if you do know it, there’s not one whit of mystery or suspense in Devil’s Due, which plays like a faded Xerox copy of Levin’s masterpiece, with none of its insouciant humor or devastating chills. In fact the most single salient horror in Rosemary’s Baby is that a poor, innocent woman is surrounded by a literal coven of folks taking part in a quite cosmic conspiracy. The fact that Levin was able to turn immaculate conception on its head (or its tail, as the case may be) in the process was simply another one of Rosemary Baby’s crowning achievements. Devil’s Due takes Levin’s now tired and even trite seeming premise, attempting to tart it up in a found footage format that only exacerbates the writing shortcomings of the film. When even the found footage approach turns out to be hilariously inept, not much is left for Devil’s Due to do other than engage in a series of hackneyed horror film clichés that may end up provoking as much laughter as fright.

Many of the better found footage films, like progenitor The Blair Witch Project, succeed based on the fact that the reason for the footage being there in the first place is readily explained, and also due to the fact that the footage is often integrally linked to just one or two main characters, as with the mucus challenged young woman whose campground confessional proved to be one of Blair Witch’s most memorable moments. Devil’s Due attempts to stitch together a much larger—indeed, global—story and so has to rely on a variety of found footage gambits to cobble together its story. That deprives the film of that all important connection between the found footage and at least one or two of the characters, and it may in fact prove to be a fatal flaw (albeit only one of several).

The opening moments provide a decent enough rationale to meet young husband Zach (Zach Gilford), who is in a bloodied and disheveled state while being interviewed at the local police station, which is obviously filming the interchange. As soon as the film segues to Zach’s flashback explaining how he got to be in such a sorry state, writer Lindsay Devlin and directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett stumble pretty much out of the gate, although ironically it’s in attempting to link the found footage with Zach and his new bride Sam (Allison Miller) that they do so. Some of the footage involving Zach and Sam is relatively easy to take, but as the film goes on, the two seem like they’re on some kind of Guinness Book of World Records’ quest to accumulate the most video selfies ever recorded.

The height of this particular pretense probably comes in what should be one of the film’s most suspenseful sequences, after the newlyweds are delivered to a top secret party in the bowels of an old building. Both Zach and Sam imbibe too much—or are they drugged?—before Sam is carted off for a rather satanic version of “It’s Just Lunch”. But here the directors have to engage in one of the most self serving moments in found footage history. If the film had been told simply from the point of view of the protagonists, their drugged in and out of consciousness transitions would have been readily understandable. But here, the “video” cuts in and out. Is the camera losing consciousness, or is it some magically aligned glitch that is supposed to evoke Sam’s passing in and out of a wakeful state? One way or the other, it’s resolutely silly and is the kind of thing that draws attention to itself, not in a good way.

Once Sam finds herself mysteriously pregnant, things play out pretty much according to the Levin inspired template. Sam sees a kind of creepy obstetrician—check. Sam starts having cravings for raw meat—check. The satanic spawn inside of her seems to have a mind of its own and is out to make its presence known—check. Even the somewhat ambiguous ending, which has Sam engaging in either an act of self immolation or attempted infanticide, does little to up this film’s chill factor. Devil’s Due begins with a self-serving Biblical quote which points to a whole bevy of little antichrists roaming the Earth (in a perhaps unwitting allusion to another Levin masterpiece, The Boys From Brazil). The supposedly chilling coda ostensibly shows the viewer that Sam and Zach’s story is just one of many, evidently. Hopefully the others are more compelling than this mess.

Devil's Due Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Devil's Due is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. It's hard to get too worked up over the film's kind of lackluster appearance since at least part of this appearance is due to an intentional choice to give the film a kind of lo-fi video ambience. There are abundant video artifacts in evidence, from shimmer and aliasing to moiré patterns, as well as occasional noise in darker sequences. Even brightly lit scenes like the wedding sequence don't pop with a lot of color or precision, and in fact a lot of Devil's Due looks pretty soft, with inconsistent contrast that doesn't help define the image but ends up masking it at times. Several key sequences have been filtered and/or color graded to within an inch of their lives, including the red soaked finale. These scenes probably suffer additionally from a lack of shadow detail and fine detail merely due to their highly skewed palettes.

Devil's Due Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Devil's Due's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is a surprisingly engaging affair, with some fantastic LFE that occurs first during the conception scene and which then recurs late in the film during what might be termed an "assisted birth" scene. The use of a pulsating, vibrating sound effect to announce the presence of Satan is one of the film's best and most distinctive choices, and it resounds through the soundstage with a lot of presence and punch. Dialogue is cleanly and clearly presented and is well positioned directionally at several key moments, notably in the noisy but very effectively mixed climax. Fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is extremely wide.

Devil's Due Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 16:35)


• Radio Silence: A Hell of a Team (1080p; 12:13) profiles the creatives behind the film.


• Director's Photo Album (1080p)


• Ashes to Ash (1080p; 00:54) is more ostensible found footage.


• The Lost Time (1080p; 3:30) is even more found footage, this one involving two Spanish speaking kids.


• Roommate Alien Prank Goes Bad (1080i; 2:19) is remarkably unfunny.


• Mountain Devil Prank Fails Horribly (1080i; 3:26). And, yet, this one is even unfunnier.


• Audio Commentary with Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler, Gillett, Chad Villella, and Justin Martinez. These guys come off as your obnoxious frat brothers who don't know when to shut up or what exactly to say. One of them asks, "Wouldn't it be funny if we just sat here and said nothing?" Yes, and maybe even preferable.

Devil's Due Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Ira Levin repeatedly gifted readers with astounding "high concepts" that were so unique that they almost instantly passed into legend, as well as perhaps the Collective Unconscious. Nowhere was Levin's particular genius more potent than in the concept underlying Rosemary's Baby, and try as many have through the years, no one has been able to deliver a more chilling version of the tale than Levin himself. The fact that Devil's Due adds insult to injury by making this one of the most preposterous "found footage" films in recent memory ironically only helps to prove what an incalculable achievement Rosemary's Baby really was (and continues to be). Spend some quality time with Levin's book or Roman Polanski's amazingly successful film version instead.