Director: Alistair Legrand
Distributor: Splendid Film
Duration: 87 minutes
The Diabolical (Blu-ray) – Movie Review
It’s been a while since we last reviewed a horror movie, but here we are again with the new release of ‘The Diabolical’. The title itself already suggests much horror, even though you might have to wait a bit to shiver and tremble. Nonetheless, the story isn’t all that bad.
Madison (Ali Larter) and her two children Haley (Chloe Perrin) and Jacob (Max Rose) live in an ordinary house in an ordinary city. Since their dad left, the children are having a hard time, especially Jacob, who even gets treated for his anger issues. in the meantime, Madison starts to notice that the house is not as ordinary as it may seem, as monsters wander around at night, looking like humans with their skin stripped off. Everything always starts with a flash of light, and with a second flash, the monsters disappear again. Madison decides to contact some psychic detectives, who run off the minute they find something suspicious, without giving a proper explanation. When one morning the kids go outside and slowly start dying, it’s clear that something scary is going on. There is nothing left to do for the family than to stay inside, while Madison tries to find a solution on the internet. As if the situation isn’t already complicated enough, she also has to deal with a realtor who very eagerly wants to buy her house and get the family out, with force if need be, though always with an eerie smile. The man scares Madison, but she refuses to sell the house, as it may well mean the death of her two children.
While browsing through Google, Madison finds out that a local company might purposely do experiments on them, and as it happens, it’s the same company the scary realtor works for. Lucky for her, her boyfriend Nikolai (Arjun Gupta), who also happens to be Jacob’s science teacher, is there to help, to try and stop the monsters, who start to appear ever more frequently and intensely.
From the beginning, the film has a nice flow to it. There is some kind of introduction where we meet Madison and the children, as well as Nikolai, while teaching Jacob. Soon though the film gets more interesting when the monsters appear. Even though this might already seem scary, it isn’t really that much. Nonetheless, the further the story progresses, the scarier it gets.
The storyline isn’t greatly original, but nonetheless it is told in a sufficiently interesting way for it to be entertaining. Over the course of the movie, the atmosphere slowly gets to the right setting, thus allowing you to get into the right mood, even though that could have happened a bit sooner. This might also have something to do with the fact that the movie is a bit of a mixture of different things. While there is the main story which concerns the monsters, there is also the budding relationship between Madison and Nikolai, as well as Jacob’s anger issues. While in one way it is nice to have some variety, at the same time this stops the atmosphere from building properly, even though all these aspects of the movie prove to be relevant in one way or another.
Acting performances are quite decent throughout the entire movie. Ali Larter plays a convincing single mother of two, trying to protect her children from an evil force she can’t battle herself. The children, Chloe Perrin and Max Rose do a nice job as well, certainly the latter is quite convincing to watch, certainly in the scenes between the two kids.
There are no extras to enjoy on this Blu-ray release, leaving you with nothing more than the film itself. As the movie is nothing really out of the ordinary, there is no real need for extras, nonetheless it would have made the purchase more worthwhile, given Blu-rays aren’t the cheapest things to buy. A bit more info about the company or the monsters themselves would have been appreciated.
Conclusion
The Diabolical is a horror film with a proper storyline, be it not quite that original, but nonetheless entertaining and with an unexpected twist. Even though it takes some time to find the right atmosphere, the pace takes a nice tempo. Add in quite decent acting performances and you have one of the better horror films out there, one that might actually scare you every now and then.
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[…] a mother moving into a different home with her two kids, sounds a lot like the beginning of The Diabolical, which we only reviewed last week. Certain plot twists are rather predictable, such as the fact […]