How many of you out there ever watched Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and thought to yourselves, "Say, this movie is pretty good and all, but what it really needs is worse performances and a first-person perspective on everything that’s happening.." If so, there’s a special place in hell with your name on it, and part of that hell has come to Earth in the form of Devil’s Due, the devilish debut feature from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (V/H/S), which spawned its second trailer, seen above. I’m pretty sure it’s a horror movie, but it could possibly be part of an advertising campaign for a Christian abstinence group.
The basic story behind Devil’s Due finds Zack Gilford (Friday Night Lights) and Allison Miller (Blood: The Last Vampire) as Zach and Samantha, a loving couple who get married and have a mysteriously spotty honeymoon that leaves them expecting a baby. Zach just has to record everything on a camera, of course, and it becomes clear Samantha is changing, with more than just a normal human baby in her womb. What follows looks something like The Last Exorcist with a baby. Get Tom Selleck, Ted Danson and Steve Guttenberg on the phone, since they know how to handle stuff like this.
This trailer manages to chink the armor of my general opinion on trailers. The first Devil’s Due preview was two minutes long and looked like it went through the entire damned movie, with tons of what you know are going to be the film’s biggest scare sequences. This second trailer, via Yahoo! Movies, gives us a nice wraparound story of Zach obviously in custody for something that happened to the wife, and then goes into the marriage and subsequent problems surrounding the satanic fetus, quickly peppering in some of the freaky parts without going overboard. And most of it happens beneath dialogue, so you’re not just listening to people screaming while they’re being telepathically thrown into walls and across fields. This technique is a lot more successful in drawing interest without potentially spoiling it, so it should make me happy, right? (Buzzer sound.)
The problem with that technique here is it makes Devil’s Due look even more derivative than it already is. You sort of need to see the couple getting the church involved to widen the scope of the story. This movie should be more than Paranormal Neonatal Activity, where things are always flying off the walls in giant suburban homes, but I have my doubts.
Make an appointment to see your OBGYNecronomicon when Devil’s Due hits theaters on January 17, 2014. Follow the doomed couple’s story a little more in the longer trailer below.
