There is always a massive amount of fallout when a certain type of movie becomes a surprise hit. Friday the 13th kick-started a seemingly endless flood of slasher clones, the torture porn bleakness of Saw was responsible for many increasingly mean-spirited efforts and our most recent guilty party is 2009's Paranormal Activity which has brought the sub-genre of found footage to a point, to me anyway, of exhaustion. It's a sub-genre fuelled on faux reality, where you can shoot cheaply simply by shoving a video camera into your actor's hands and give the audience their viewpoint. Which filmmakers have, again and again and again. This is why Devil's Due is nothing more than a tiresome, mostly uninteresting, entry that tries to mesh found footage with a Rosemary's Baby vibe. It's loaded with your typical vague, out-of-focus bullshit and relies way too much on the "loud noise" scares I so adore. It also has a bit too leisurely a pace making it just tedious enough that, when it does kick into gear quite effectively in the last fifteen minutes, you probably won't care much. But not caring much pretty much describes my current opinion on found footage anyway.

Meet Zach (Zach Gilford) and Samantha (Allison Miller), a young couple who have recently married and are heading for their honeymoon in the Dominican Republic. On a whim they decide to go see a palm reader who proceeds to spout ominous things to them about being "born from death" and "they've been waiting". After getting the Hell away from this unpleasant seer, our couple is convinced by a cab driver to go to an underground bar which ends with them getting wasted and falling victim to what seems like a cult - even though they remember nothing the next day.

Not long after returning home, Samantha discovers she's pregnant. This is a huge surprise since they've always used birth control. But it doesn't promise to be a very normal pregnancy when she starts waking up with odd injuries and nosebleeds, gets a craving for raw meat, and gains some odd powers (like unexplained strength). There also seems to be strangers watching them. Everyone thinks she's paranoid, she thinks the baby is in danger, and this leads us to a finale that slings a lot of blood and has such a well-done intensity that I found myself disappointed the lead-up to this moment couldn't have been more interesting.

In the leads, Miller and Gilford do an okay job. Unlike Katie and Micah from Paranormal, there's not enough realistic feeling chemistry between them. Miller does get to go through the wringer here and I did enjoy her performance for the most part having to go from a regular 20-something newlywed to being always paranoid to contorting on the floor, but Gilford is somewhat bland considering he's meant to be a sort of "hero" figure. Everyone else does their jobs competently, but I didn't get very big impressions from them.

Known for their "10/31/98" segment in V/H/S, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett have delivered a found footage flick that shows some flashes of promise (the finale and a pretty cool moment involving some teens running across Samantha in the woods) and I did like some of their imagery with the still-standing sentinels and a "get out" moment that works. It's just that what's here we've seen before, the script tries to establish our couple's relationship but it mostly feels thin, and I was constantly sitting there thinking "who films their lives like this?!" making me disconnect from the realism angle completely. There's also no real emotional impact - which is why first few Paranormal movies worked because we cared for our victims.

Devil's Due is just another (mostly) forgettable found footage entry that has enough okay things going for it to not be a complete wash, I just think I'm at a point now where I'm incredibly tired of this style of movie. It doesn't come nowhere near reaching the heights of [Rec] but it, thankfully, doesn't sink to the levels of the fourth Paranormal flick either. If you're not as burnt-out as I am on this sub-genre, you have worse options, but instead of watching this homage to Polanski's 1968 classic, maybe just watch that instead - at least it'll be in focus. (Chris Hartley, 12/1/14)

Directed By: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett.
Written By: Lindsay Devlin.

Starring: Allison Miller, Zach Gilford, Sam Anderson, Roger Payano.