If you’d revealed to me this was Neil Blomkamp joint after I saw it, I wouldn’t believe you. I’ve found his movies not exactly perfect over the years but certainly capable at the least. But Demonic just seems like an amateur effort with a gimmick that ultimately doesn’t really make any difference to an otherwise generic horror movie.

Demonic is about a woman who is brought to a clinic to see her estranged comatose mom. They have a gimm… I mean technology that allows her to enter her mom’s mind so she dives in. Only to find, in this cheep Instagram filter VR space, that mom is actually possessed by one of them there demons. And now its after her.

Yes, the high-tech simulation this movie uses is just actors on a sound stage overlaid with some cheap filters. Occasionally this effect reminds me of a survival horror video game with its camera angles and that might have been intentional (and there’s maybe a warp tube at one point too). But none of this really matters… it’s just a gimmick to hang a pretty generic spook show movie on. There are some actually more interesting ideas with a team of Vatican soldiers but that also kind of winds up being window dressing.

I’m afraid I just didn’t find anything else particularly unique and certainly nothing scary or chilling about this flick. We get another contortionist monster at one point and I suppose the demon’s appearance is a little different from the typical. Doesn’t make a difference though and it ultimately looks like a vaguely defined cheap Halloween outfit sometimes. The little you see of it.

Eh… nothing much here to recommend it. I guess if you just gotta see everything from Blomkamp, it might be worth checking out. But don’t get fooled by its high-tech angle since it doesn’t really matter to the plot and it’s mediocre in its execution anyway. As a demon possession movie… it tries occasionally but is ultimately just another in a long line of bad horror movies. Join the club.

Score: 66