The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It – No Devil’s in This One

This movie did nothing for me. I wasn’t scared; I wasn’t interested. I never gave one single crap. I don’t know if this is a particularly uninteresting outing for the franchise, Rotten Tomatoes rated it as 56%, but I couldn’t get into it. My voice notes are always a mess of snark and judgement, but this time, even I’m surprised by the level of criticism.

If you haven’t seen it, check out The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It here before reading on.

Prime wants me to know that there are several movies called The Devil Made Me Do It. And that I could watch The Summer I Turned Pretty. I’m not really sure how that one snuck in.

This house looks just terrible. How did they even manage to knock over the chandelier? The destruction is both impressive and a little confusing. We are in this house to document the exorcism of David Glatzel. He’s 8 years old. Ed is once again running this thing despite having told us a bunch of times that he can’t do exorcisms, and then doing them anyway.

Everyone thinks it’s a great idea to send David to bed, possessed and unsupervised, while they wait for the priest to arrive. Arne, David’s sister Debbie’s boyfriend, is the one to tuck him in. He is working on getting that family approval, aggressively. He promises David he won’t let anything bad happen to him. Unkeepable promises, my dude. There’s so much crap coming for you guys. I hate to break it to you, but 2020 is gonna be a hell of a year. And the 2008 recession. And you know what, never mind. The priest rolls up, full on Exorcist style. It’s time to get this really started.

This triggers the demon to mess with David. He hides in the bathtub as do so many horror movie kids. I thought we’d all agreed that under the covers was the hide from-bedroom-monsters location of choice? The demon isn’t fooled, finding him instantly sticking his creepy fingers over the top of the curtain. The shower turns on. To blood. I don’t have that setting. David jumps out and his family comes to check on him.

The kid is deep in demon delusion and runs at his dad with a shiv he acquired from…somewhere. Ed says we need to get this kid to the church. Why weren’t we already there? What was everyone doing hanging around here? They can’t get David out of the house now, so the dining room is gonna have to work. He looks like he has rabies.

Things are going about as well as I thought. The demon tosses all the fancy plates around and the priest goes down. Ed jumps in and David pulls an odd contortion move that you might see any given weekend at a dance competition. (My contortionist child has removed any fear from these things for me.) No one here has ever seen Cirque du Soeil, so they get pretty freaked out.

The demon calls Ed an old man and gives him a heart attack. I don’t feel like Patrick Wilson is that old here and I’m a little insulted. (He was 48 when this came out. Since I’ll be 40 in 2 years, I refuse to consider that old.) Arne offers himself to the demon. And the demon goes with that. It’s a dumb demon. It’s in the endgame with David, but is going to start all over with Arne? Why? Stupid demon notwithstanding, Ed is the only one to see this exchange and, yep, he goes unconscious because he is lightly dying.

Ed is still out, but he’s gonna be fine. Judy is here, yet again played by a new actress. She’s in college now.

Arne and Debbie are over at Debbie’s parents for a BBQ. They actually cleaned this place up pretty quick. Arne is grabbing the meats, but the cereal is moving around on its own. Which is unusual. A rat pops out of the box and scurries into the wall. Arne puts HIS EYE DIRECTLY UP TO THE RAT HOLE, which is how you get your eye bit off. A woman appears behind him and startles him. Then it all disappears. That’s about it. She’s pretty much your standard overly strict principal at a stuffy private school lady. Austere, but not scary.

Arne goes to his day job, which is tree trimming. I think. He has a chainsaw on a rope, swinging around while he is belted up in a tree. None of this seems safe. The woman from earlier startles him by looking at him from a window. Can we not people watch now? He almost chainsaws off his own head. He looks pretty ill anyway, so they send him home before he causes a lot of workman’s comp paperwork.

He gets back to his apartment with Debbie at the dog kennel where she works. Her boss, Bruno, is a truly annoying man, and he plays his music too loud. Bruno needs Arne to fix his speaker so he can annoy everyone within a 5-mile radius with his music. Arne looks like he has the plague. He fixes the speaker, though. Now Arne has to sit and listen to music at ear bleeding levels. The puppies are just in the next room. This is animal abuse.

Back at the hospital, Ed wakes up. Everyone is excited he’s alive, but all he wants to do is tell Lorraine that Arne is all possessed. This is an issue because that demon is very stabby. Lorraine calls the police near the kennel and says something bad is going to happen there. I don’t know if that would work but in movieland it does.

Things are heating up at the kennel. Every dog within 60 miles is barking, the radio is giving me a headache, and Arne is sitting on the couch with resting dead face. Bruno and Debbie are dancing, kind of, but to Arne it looks like Bruno has turned into a monster and is eating her. Arne shoves her down a hallway as the monster Bruno lunges at him. Conveniently there’s a knife within reach and Arne gets to stabbing.

The cops arrive as Arne does his best walking dead impression on the road. They take a quick look at his blood-stained shirt and ask if he’s good. He is not good.

Arne’s in jail now. I mean, he killed a guy. Pretty casually. The Warrens bring a bunch of holy stuff to provoke an evil spirit, but it doesn’t work. Arne is not possessed. BUT! Don’t give up hope yet because he could have been before. Debbie sticks up for him, saying it was not Arne that murdered Bruno. They want the defense attorney to claim he is innocent by reason of possession. This is not a pleading. Also, she says that the court won’t allow it.

Now, Ed claims that the court accepts the existence of God every time a witness swears on a bible. And I hate to nitpick (I don’t) but this isn’t true. It accepts that the witness accepts the existence of God. You can swear in on a bunch of stuff. Doesn’t have to be a Bible.

Anyway, they take the attorney back to the house and traumatize her with Annabelle to convince her to do what they want. That seems reasonable. But we had to give Annabelle her screen time, or she gets cranky.

They make the absolutely not real pleading in court. The prosecution is going for the death penalty, so the Warrens need some hard facts to save Arne. They revisit the interviews with the family to figure out where the demon started bothering the family. It all started with a move. Of course. David finds a waterbed in one room and jumps around on it as is required of all children. It seems like this bed might already have someone living in it, though.

Dead people floating inside a water bed is a fresh fear for me. Now I’m gonna have to check them all. Check your grandma’s house lemons. Someone from inside reaches up and grabs David, thus possessing him. The floor under the water bed still has some demon goo on it. Lorraine thinks it might be coming from under the floor and does a little exploration in the crawl space. And what do you know? There’s a little evil totem hanging out there. It’s a curse thing. This is a great place to hide things because I have simply never been and never will be curious about what is in the crawl space. Never.

The Warrens say it’s a satanist curse thing. They ship a bunch of pictures off to police stations to see if anyone else has seen one. They also take one to a retired priest who studied cults. Father Kastner, it seems, knows all about curses and chickens. He isn’t incredibly helpful, though, and more or less says they should forget they saw the totem. But in the end he takes them to see his room of cult items! Lorraine is very judgey about this, considering she has one of these rooms herself. Kastner specifically studied the Disciples of the Ram from the Annabelle movies. See, it’s all connected.

Principal witch lady is standing over an altar with black candles for ambiance and looking at a photo of Arne. Where did she get that? She originally was going after David. She uses this to make demon things happen to him while he is in jail. Other inmates, real or imagined, attack Arne.

They luck out with the totem photos, finding a station in Danvers that has seen one before. The Warrens head out to find out what happened. Jessica and Katie, ‘best friends’ according to the cop, were hanging out together when Jessica stabbed Katie 22 times and then went missing. They found a totem at Jessica’s house. The Warrens fill the detective in on what they think is happening. He is dubious. Lorraine offers to find Jessica in exchange for access to the file.

Debbie visits the jail with David. David and Arne bond a little over the terrors of possession and Arne confesses he still hears the demon.

Lorraine heads to the crime scene where Katie was killed. She goes into a trance, acting out the events of the evening. Jessica gives Katie a bracelet and they share an intimate moment. Best friends, my ass, they were lovers in the nighttime. Jessica turns stabby fast, going from gift giving to stabbing in 2 secs flat. Jessica comes to for a moment and runs off a cliff into the river below.

Lorraine has been acting all of this out and almost jumps off the cliff herself. Ed stops her just in time. Attempting to run to her, but slowed down by his heart condition. A demon hand reaches up, pulling her over. Ed manages to get her back, but when the paramedics look him over, they admonish him for not remembering to carry his meds, but hey at least they found Jessica’s body in the water.

Debbie frantically calls to let the Warrens know the demon wants Arne to kill himself. Ed tells her to call the jail and have him put on a suicide watch. So a priest goes and gives him a GLASS bottle of holy water. I don’t think people on suicide watch can have glass. They can’t even have shoelaces. He makes a protective ring of holy water around himself. I don’t know how there was enough in there for this, but props for coming up with a strategy. Don’t expect it to work.

Lorraine remembers she got glimpses of the witch lady when touching David. She figures if she could touch Jessica’s body, maybe that would work, too. Let’s just break into the funeral home for a little skin to skin time with some dead peeps. Ew. Oh, and the lights in the embalming room are on a timer. Because that makes any kind of sense. Ed figures 15 minutes is good.

Lorraine grabs Jessica’s partially decomposed and waterlogged hand. She ends up walking through a castle looking hallway. It gives me catacomb vibes. A train whistles. She sees the altar with Arne’s picture and the ritual is beginning. The witch causes Arne to break the glass bottle and cut himself. Lorraine panics and stops the woman from continuing. Unfortunately, this makes our witch friend aware of her presence. The connection works both ways.

The lights shut off. Ed gets them back on in time to see another body standing in the corner. A huge goliath sized man. Imposing. Scary. But then he runs, and it’s like a teletubby. Lorraine is stuck in place, but we know she will not die here. Ed pulls her away. Excellent work team, now the witch lady knows who you are and can send teletubbies after you at will.

Thankfully, the Warren’s assistant found some information on the ritual curse that is plaguing Arne. The first half is in Latin which, as is standard, everyone speaks but the rest? It’s in Aramaic. What we can decipher says that there needs to be a murder and then a suicide. I think we already know that because of what happened to Jessica and what is happening to Arne. Ed stands up and immediately passes out. We all assume this is too much for his fragile heart.

He wakes up in his bed with the house dark and quiet. The front door is broken open and Lorraine is missing. He panics calling her name. Instead, he finds the witch lady. She disappears as the giant corpse from the morgue rushes toward Ed. He fights back, attempting to stab the already dead body. There’s a shift in the room and poof! Ed was in a delusion and actually trying to stab Lorraine. He is cursed now, too.

But where is the totem? Hiding inside a vase of flowers. I want to know how she got it in there. Did she build it inside like people do with those little bottle boats? And how did it know to curse Ed? Debbie and Drew were here before Ed and Lorraine got home. Just hanging out with the totem and uncursed the whole time.

With things serious now, Lorraine heads to Kastner’s again to get him to read the Aramaic and finish explaining the curse while the others stay behind to figure out where the lair is. Through a bunch of convoluted nonsense we determine that, gasp for effect, the lair is at KASTNER’S! Ed follows after Lorraine. God, cellphones would be so helpful right now.

Kastner finishes explaining the curse. It needs one child, one lover, and one man of god to kill someone and then themselves to be complete. So, demon messed up jumping into Arnie because now we have no child. Two lovers, zero children. Lorraine follows Kastner into his creepy basement of evil, where he has a backstory to share.

He, a priest, had a child. The mother died and childbirth and he raised that poor little girl in secret in this spooky basement. I’m sure that didn’t traumatize her into becoming a cult obsessed witch. Oh, it did? Perfect. His daughter has returned to build a cult altar in the catacombs beneath the house. This is on Kastner. He really messed that kid up. She returns home as Kastner sends Lorraine into the catacombs to find and destroy the altar.

Isla, the daughter, is on to him. She kills her dad before following after Lorraine.

Lorraine finds the altar easily, but it’s made of stone and she tries to flip it, very unsuccessfully. She keeps trying. Isla and Lorraine tussle in the tunnels until Ed arrives. He uses a sledgehammer to get into the catacombs and is found instantly by Isla, who curses him again. Now he’s on a warpath and his only goal is to kill Lorraine.

This leaves Isla free to start possessing Arne again. He’s restrained to a bed in the jail with Debbie and a priest. I didn’t think they allowed visitors like that. Arne gets free from his restraints and scuttles across the floor, extra creepy style, eventually floating in the air.

Debbie pulls at his arm, desperately trying to prevent him from slitting his own throat with a shard of glass.

Lorraine begs Ed to remember her. In his case, Debbie is also screaming for Arne to come back to her, it works. Ed’s eyes clear and instead of sledgehammering Lorraine, he destroys the altar. Arne falls to the floor, no longer possessed.

Isla appears from the shadows. Apparently, since she didn’t finish her curse of killing 6 people, the demon gets to kill her. He comes out of the shadows and does just that. This is a really risky bet. Curse 3 people until they kill both another person and then themselves OR you die. And we never even find out what she gets if she wins.

Finally, we see Arne’s trial. He is convicted of manslaughter and goes to prison for 5 years, during which he and Debbie got married. Happy ending? I’m not really sure.

See you all next week for the last entry in the Conjuring Universe, for now, The Nun 2.