Macabre…ish Horror Review: Bedeviled
Bedeviled, 2016/ 1 hr 35 min
Teens are invited to download an app like siri called Mr. Bedevil, it’s an AI and gathers info from the internet about the users, supposedly to be more user friendly. But it has a lot more functions than it should and without prompting. It seems kind of cool but definitely intrusive and creepy.
Alice (Saxon Sharbino) downloads it because her friends did but she’s immediately creeped out by it. She falls asleep in school and has a nightmare of some kind of bow tied creature.
Mr. Bedevil app also has strange prompts and it suggests eerie games, such as suggesting there are ghosts in the room and having Alice look around the room with her phone and seeing something scary in the window.
It also asks intrusive questions and creates tension in friend groups and between couples before threatening them. And then it shows up in reflections and just out of the corner of your eye. Sometimes appearing momentarily corporeal in your face, just long enough to terrify you. It uses each person’s deepest fears to torment the user.
Then once you’re terrified and alone, Mr. Bedevil (Jordan Essoe) himself shows up. He can be a grotesquely elongated monster or appear your terrifying grandmother or as a cop but either way, you’ll know it’s him.
He torments everyone who has the app. Whether it’s uploading sexual videos to social media or causing causing people to hallucinate their fears. Maybe he’ll just turn all the lights out and leave you in the dark. It’ll usually be followed by gales of maniacal laughter pouring out of their phones.
The friends finally get together and share notes to figure out what’s happening. And discover someone from school has died from shock and a heart attack. Then they find one of their friend’s, Gavin (Carson Boatman), deceased, sitting in a chair with his phone in his hand and laughter blaring out of it.
Out of desperation, Alice and Cody (Mitchell Edwards), go to their old tutor, Samuel Price’s (Matty Finochio) house because he sent the app invitation to Nikki (Alexis G. Zall). At his house, it’s empty and they find a bloody corpse in the garage. In front of it sits a camcorder and reel to reel recorder, they turn it on and hear the tutor’s voice. It explains what Mr. Bedevil actually is and the role of technology in his reign of terror.
When Dan (Brandon Soo Hoo) finally goes to the police, the officer he talks to is possessed by Mr. Bedevil. Finally, Cody decides to use his program and write code to uninstall the app from their phones. But he discovers it’s adapting to and rewriting the firmware. So he has to try something else
In the mean time, Mr. Bedevil is still terrorizing them and killing them with their fears. So Cody and Alice are going for the 2 pronged approach to stop him, set up a trap in the physical world for Alice to distract him, while Cody uses technology to break his connection with them.
This is the only plan, either it works or they are dead.
This is a Vang Brothers production and for a supernatural horror, it’s pretty scary. Lots of jump scares, monsters, mangled people but very little blood or gore. It’s not particularly graphic but it seems like it is. The pacing is good, the monster designs range from odd to deranged. I really enjoyed this.