Conjuring the Devil follows a tradition as old as VHS tapes, known to attack oblivious grandparents who buy what they think is a Disney classic, but they actually bought a “mockbuster.” A “mockbuster” is a cheap production made to look like another film—a popular film. In this case, we have a title and a poster made to confuse people into thinking this is a part of The Conjuring (2013) series. The series famously has an evil nun (who got her own spin-off in The Nun (2018)) and the third official film in the series is The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021).
The film is about the members of a church. They are all somehow affected by sin. Some are drug users, there are fornicators, lesbians, and one is a trans-woman. All is well until a bigoted priest starts doing the sermons and then… well, I don’t know what is happening. The congregation starts having nightmares. The lesbian dreams of being seduced by a female demon. The trans-woman sees herself as a bloated surgical mess. I think the priest is causing these illusions. You know what, I don’t care.
There are no redeemable things to mention. It’s insanely bad. The acting is worse than you would expect from an elementary school play. The direction is all over the place. Every shot is shaky and criminally zoomed in. Every edit is misplaced. Most of the sound is obviously ADR. There was no color correction or sound mixing done in post-production. The freaking evil nun on the cover isn’t even a huge part of the god damn thing!
There is an unwritten rule between me and every filmmaker that makes cheap knockoff horror flicks that their film’s running time should not exceed 80 minutes. Conjuring the Devil is 114 minutes, and those 114 minutes are long, boring, and filled with things you hate.
