Deliver Us From Evil [USA, 2014]

Nine Things about the Movie Deliver Us From Evil


1. Another week, another horror movie “based on a true story”. Actually, this movie contains the tag “inspired by the actual accounts of an NYPD sergeant”. It’s based on a real cop named Ralph Sarchie, who saw “The Exorcist” when he was 12 and decided to fight demons when he grew up. He knows demons are around because he gets headaches. So he wrote a book about how he performed some exorcisms. Then Hollywood took the idea of Sarchie and made up a whole new story that never happened. Even the real Sarchie says it’s fiction.

2. In the movie, soldiers in Iraq get possessed and come back to the Bronx. Ralph Sarchie is a cop that fell away from religion, but has a gift of finding evil. He stumbles into the Iraqi demons. In order to defeat the evil, he must go to confession and return to the Catholic Church.

3. This is another routine horror film where nothing ever really happens besides your regular collection of jump scares. Most of the movie takes place on rainy nights, in places where the electricity doesn’t work. Maybe that’s normal in the Bronx, I don’t know.

4. Far from being scary, the demon-possessed people just look kind of pathetic or silly. Especially when they act like cats.

5. One of the weapons that the demons use to spread evil in the world are songs by The Doors.

6. There’s a scene where a demonic soldier attacks a cop with a hammer. Instead of taking out his gun and shooting him, the cop decides to take on the demon with a knife. You can guess how that turns out.

7. The climax of the film is just another variation of “The Exorcist”.

8. The scariest part of the movie is in the “owl doll in the bedroom” scene. Which is in the trailer. Which also never happened in real life.

9. In one part of the movie, Sarchie tells a chain-smoking undercover priest that none of this makes sense - he doesn’t understand it. The priest tells him that absolute evil usually doesn’t make sense.

Which must mean that this movie is absolutely evil, because it doesn’t make sense either.