If anyone finds this tape…
Main Cast: Tara Rule, Rotisha Geter
Director: Jenni Farley
Well that wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. 2024’s DEVON got off to a rough start with some so-so acting and meh dialogue as a group of people are contacted by a website and offered the chance to make money by investigating an abandoned mental asylum where, they’re told, a little girl named Devon was placed and then vanished from.
The five don’t know each other when they all convene at the hospital, but they soon start to bond and form pairs, leaving one poor girl out of the loop and left to suffer the hospital on her own.
DEVON is told in found footage format, technically, but it’s not always from the perspective of one of the many cameras—we do get a brief flashback in one scene—and it’s told in retrospect as the movie opens with one of the team fleeing the hospital after a group of kids break in the next morning. The rest of the narrative is shown while the police question the woman on the whereabouts of the others.
And like I said, it was a rough start; a few of the characters were just plain not good people, or the actors in those parts played them as bad people. Either way, I did not enjoy their presence onscreen. But once things into gear, the rest of the story is pretty non-stop on until the end.
The con there is that it takes almost half the movie to get to that point. Another con is that, in better found footage movies, they always seem to find a way to hold the camera relatively still with some decent lightning. Not DEVON, though. Nope, this movie was meant to be seen on a big screen—not a movie screen, this is NOT a theatrical release—with as little ambient light as possible, because if there’s even a glimmer of light, you’re not seeing anything on the screen.
And the sound. Oh my God, I don’t remember the last time I saw a movie that had so much incoherent screaming. Thank God for subtitles!
But then we get to the good in the last 15 minutes where the action and the “scares” really kick into high gear, the place seems to be swarming with ghosts, and then there’s a third act turn I definitely didn’t see coming, one that brings about the resolution in a very satisfactory manner.
Some of the acting was terrible (cough cough Steven Etienne) while some was good (Tara Rule) and some started off rough but came around in the end (Rotisha Geter). But what really surprised me was that DEVON was written and directed by Jenni Farley, who I was vaguely familiar with by her more commonly known name, JWoww, of Jersey Shore fame. I’ve seen exactly one episode of Jersey Shore, enough to know that, despite my love of The Real World and Road Rules, this one wasn’t for me. But you couldn’t watch an episode of The Challenge or even turn on MTV for years without at least knowing the cast of characters from that show. And, of course, forming opinions of them based on what you saw. So if you’d told me back then that JWoww would be a writer and director of horror movies, I don’t think I would have believed you. But here we are.
However, I can’t give all the credit to Farley because then I’d have to ignore the other hardest working member of the cast and crew, Tara Rule. She not only starred as Kat, one of the better and more sympathetic characters, Rule also played an extra and served as the film’s editor, special effects, colorist, sound design, and titles (in addition to Anthony Serrantonio who also wore several hats for this production). Talk about all hands on deck, and a lot of those hands belonged to the same few people. I love a scrappy DIY production, especially when it looks as good as this one. And my wife and I have been on several “ghost hunts” at a local “haunted” asylum, and while we’ve never seen anything concrete, the setting alone is full of tension and nervous energy. It’s easy to imagine these characters being terrified just being inside the building, whether there are ghosts or not, and it was easy to see this wasn’t a set, but an actual abandoned asylum.
I didn’t love DEVON but I respect it. The parts I did like I liked enough to maybe watch it again, with my wife next time who is also a huge found footage fan. But if we do watch it together, I’m gonna have to make sure it’s at night, it’s dark outside, and that the lights are off in the living room. I also may have to warn her that the shaky cam aspect of found footage is ramped up several degrees in this one. So while it’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever seen, it had its moments and I’m willing to revisit them at some point.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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