Back in 2010, a poll for Time’s Most Influential People of the Year ranked director Neill Blomkamp among them. His coming off the unexpected success of District 9, it’s somewhat understandable. But like Newsweek’s 2002 cover story dubbing M. Night Shyamalan “The Next Spielberg,” it has not aged very well.
In the 12 years since District 9, he’s only put out two more films—both sci-fi and both landing somewhere between middling and laughable. He pleaded to do a direct sequel to Aliens; he hoped to a direct sequel to the first RoboCop; but sorry, Neill. Just not happening in a post-Chappie world.
But hey! Shyamalan has one of his goofiest-looking efforts yet hitting theaters this week with Old, so why shouldn’t Blomkamp get his chance to creep down another step this summer too? And here’s a sneak peek with the trailer for Demonic.
At its surface, the horror-thriller seems to answer the unasked question, “What if 2000’s The Cell was a Blumhouse production?” From what we can gather, Elysium’s Carly Pope plays a woman whose estranged mother went on a homicidal rampage. To find out why, doctors ask her to enter her mom’s mind through some kind of outrageous virtual reality thing. And instead at least looking gorgeous like The Cell’s inside-the-killer’s-mind virtual world, this willfully looks like shit through a digital filter.
You’d think that’s the end of it, but no. There’s another layer.
Turns out, going in seems to have allowed the demon that was possessing the mother transfer into Pope. Oh, and speaking of Popes…
To stop this menace: THE VATICAN HAS FORMED A BLACK OPS FORCE. That is expressly a part of this movie, and it certainly is an interesting new layer.
We’ll see how influential it is when it hits theaters and VOD August 20.
