‘The Devil Inside’ has absolutely no talent inside

The scariest movie I've ever seen is "The Ring." The imagery of the woman in the black dress coming out of the picture in the video scared me silly.

"The Devil Inside" wishes that it could provoke that kind of fear response. It's pretty much the worst movie I've seen in a long, long time.

The movie tells the story of Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade), a young woman whose mother, Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley), becomes possessed and kills three people during an exorcism.

The Vatican takes control of the case and puts the elder Rossi into its psychiatric hospital in Vatican City. Isabella Rossi is told that her mother simply went crazy.

Twenty years later, she is told the truth about the exorcism. She goes to Vatican City to investigate and works with a pair of priests (Simon Quarterman and Evan Helmuth) who are performing "black market" exorcisms not sanctioned by the Church.

They agree to take her case and discover whether Maria Rossi is, in fact, possessed.

The story ends up having too much unintentional humor. At one point, a priest is prevented from killing an infant, a scene that should not prompt so much as a smile.

While the filmmakers obviously wanted this scene to be tense with a "Will he do it?" moment, Helmuth's poor acting made the entire scene funny rather than suspenseful.

"The Devil Inside" also tried for the shock aspect, with lots of sudden screaming, contortionism and blood. Once again, it was like the filmmakers had heard about shock films, but had never actually seen one.

When viewers are introduced to the subject of the first exorcism, she is shown popping her shoulder and hip joints out of place with the appropriate popping and grinding.

My only thought was that that would either feel really good, or kind of hurt. There was no instinctual grimace reaction.

The movie was not scary. That is the one thing that horror writers have to be able to do – cause fear, or at least startle you.

This movie was able to do that exactly once with a barking dog. That's all. A dog barked. But everyone in the theater jumped.

That would be good horror writing if I thought the writers had done it on purpose. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie did not live up to that one scene.

The filmmakers used a documentary style similar to "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield." While this can contribute to an immersive feel to a piece, it often is simply distracting.

There was so much fail packed into the 1 1/2 hour showing that I could hardly believe it. At one point, a character in the hospital attacks another patient and is, for all intents and purposes, having a seizure.

A Catholic priest tells the nurse, "It's all right – I'm a priest." The nurse not only accepts this claim at face value, but she leaves the dangerously unstable patient with him.

The priest then takes the patient from the hospital. Hospitals do not work that way! Not even in Vatican City.

"The Devil Inside" markets itself as "The movie that the Vatican does not want you to see!" The only reason I can see for the Vatican not wanting anyone to see this movie is compassion for those poor souls who haven't spent money on it yet.

This movie is definitely not worth seeing in the theater, and once it hits Netflix, should only be watched while incredibly intoxicated.