Little Red Devil (2008)
Review by Dr. Royce Clemens
I pride myself on being an able giver of advice, so here’s some for all of you hoping to make a horror movie about Satan and his mortal water-carriers…
Don’t. Just…Just don’t.
It’s like reverse preaching, and much like regular preaching it gets old real fast. Bringing up God will stop a party quicker than the cops will. I’m watching a horror movie. I want to get AWAY from that.
And you can’t even maneuver around the aesthetic. Robes and pentagrams will be plentiful, as will horns and goofy looking swords. Little Red Devil is just the latest entry in what I call “Dungeons & Dragons Horror.” And with one of the lesser Baldwins and E.T.’s mom in it, this one rolled a Shitty Movie +8.
We open on one of your standard cults worshipping one of your standard Dark Lords. A girl in a nightie gets up, puts on a pendant, offers herself to Satan and cuts her hand open. Sure enough, the pendant starts burning and Satan appears. He then proceeds to kill all the cultists, screw the girl and leaves without the common damn courtesy of giving her his phone number.
When you think about it, those cultists had no right to look all surprised when Ol’ Scratch disemboweled them one by one. He’s Satan. What the fuck else is he gonna do? Show up in a bathrobe and be all like “Awww, you guys went through all this just for me?”
Anyway, we fast-forward twenty-five years to Jimmy Lidell’s (Jim Lewis) bedroom. His Mother (helpfully listed in the credits as “Mother”) is chanting the Lord’s Prayer over him incessantly. She is played by Dee Wallace who in the last ten years has not only dropped the “Stone” from her name, but her dignity from practically everywhere else.
Jimmy’s a hood on the streets of Detroit with a missing girlfriend. He and his friend break into a house to find some loot, only to find kiddie porn, a little boy locked in the basement and the pendant from the opening scene. The proprietor of the house comes downstairs to shoot the intruders, except a demon comes from, well, nowhere, kills the owner after he kills the friend and vanishes.
Jimmy hopes to fence the pendant and comes across Luc, a higher up in the mob who helps Jimmy find out some dark secrets, including where his girlfriend may have disappeared to. Luc is played by Daniel Baldwin…No not the one on 30 Rock, the other one…No, not the one on Dirty Sexy Money, the other one…No, not the one who was on The Apprentice, the other one…Yeah, that one.
Where to begin with this movie? Well, the dialogue would be a good place, as it tries to go for Tarantino and winds up somewhere in Jon Favreau territory. And that is something that should not be attempted by anyone, up to and INCLUDING Jon Favreau. The lesser characters seem to wax infinite on the ins and outs of poker games and hookers, draining all the fun out of those two things and leaving empty husks you don’t want to think about anymore.
DAMN this movie…
But even that is better than the seemingly endless dialogue scenes between Jimmy and Luc, as pounds and pounds of backstory are dropped on us like balloons filled with lard. If your exposition can’t be handled in a scene or just ONE monologue, then you need to rewrite the whole damned script and seriously rethink your idea.
And I’d say Little Red Devil was derivative, but there’s only so much you can do with the idea of Satan. You don’t need to “develop” the Prince of Lies, he’s basically a cure-all. So side-stepping the fact that this movie stole its entire fucking climax from The Devil’s Advocate, I must say that I was alarmed by the similarities between this and a movie I reviewed a few months back called The Wicked (read review). That one also dealt with Satanism, backstory involving the Knights Templar, the mob and arcane aesthetics from random heavy metal album covers.
Now I’m not saying that one actively plagiarizes from the other. Sal Cavaricci made The Wicked in New York and Tommy Brunswick made Little Red Devil in Michigan at about the same time, I think. Nor am I interested in seeing the Cavaricci/Brunswick slapfight over who can make the least crumbly turd because they’re both pretty bad…Though I’ll give an edge to The Wicked because occasionally that movie was funny on purpose.
But I AM saying that all the ore has been mined from this particular kind of movie. Sure you could try to do something new with it, but the people who lap this crap up wouldn’t respect you for it. It’s done and in the past.
So knock it the hell off, would you please?
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