The Devil’s Advocate Review
I’ve come to an intriguing yet potentially (if fairly) biased conclusion: Making a horror movie is easy for people who dislike them and hard for those who don’t. Despite how debatable the final product’s quality may render that fact take into account each person’s feelings towards the genre. For people who don’t like making them it wouldn’t be a wonder: it’s horror. A genre that doesn’t exactly aim for that many positive things to work. If someone was tasked to make a horror movie, even a bad one, that is supposed to scare them they’d either decline creativity in order to shy away from any fears they may have to remain adamant to said genre or they’d harness those fears into the movie and, much like someone who was forced to be good at something they dislike (if not end up disliking once they’re good at it), go back to avoiding it now that they’ve ridden themselves of that burden.
For people who do like them I don’t think it’s a surprise. When we think of Craven, Carpenter, Romero or Argento we don’t just think of The Last House on the Left, Halloween, Martin, or Four Flies on Grey Velvet. For directors who have stayed in the genre long enough horror is like a dozen empty canvases: they can either all be filled by a different take on the artist’s vision, the artist can get more, or the artist can do both by becoming a teacher of sorts for anyone interested. Of course each work is obviously going to be different from the last as they adapt to the times. Even Peele had to teach Mr. Kaluuya to run before he could ride.
The point I want to make is this: horror movies are a lot harder to make for people who like them than it is for people who don’t because making a horror movie on its own is hard enough as it is if you’re not deeply into them (if not passionate). Obviously horror on its own is one of the most painfully subjective, and by default challenging, emotions to translate onto film. But we also know how different horror has been throughout the century. And just as terms like splatter evolve into more vulgar terms like “torture porn”, what is considered taboo simply evolves into controversial until it risks being unwatchable by just pronouncing the film’s title. People who dislike horror movies (or are just not that into them), however, just risk either pulling off something you’re not going to be sold by the trailer (seeing as that was horror enough in mostly bad ways) or something of a one-trick genre pony that was meant to help them step out of their comfort zones before they would go on to win an Oscar for something based on real life a decade or two later.
I don’t really know why a movie like the Devil’s Advocate made me go off on a tangent like this, but even as it wanted to be this wasn’t even your average 90s horror film. When people first see this movie they’re not exactly going to get something else: this is a movie where the phrase “the devil is in the details” works on too many levels. What I am going to say is this: spiritually this is 100% a courtroom drama, while physically and emotionally, this is equally divided between the latter and a horror film. In a way it started out as very much a sort of The Omen for a Post-12 Angry Men/Philadelphia/A Few Good Men world. And this is why this isn’t your average 90s horror film.
Once we know the characters of Mary Anne, Kevin, and John Milton the movie does something I hadn’t seen done cleverly in a 90s horror flick since The Dark Half: blur the line between fantasy based horror and real life horror. In fact it doesn’t even need to belong to the genre to be horrifying as scenes like Moyez’s health code hearing and the disturbing details towards the exhibits for Cullen’s case become more intense than the fantasy-based horror bits when they show up.
Basically there are scenes that count as classic horror, mainly when Mary Anne hallucinates, most of the sexual scenes, the former’s disturbing nightmare (if not her death scene), and Eddie’s death scene (which, fittingly enough given the one narrating it, felt like a horror based homage to the falling action of The Godfather).
And yet scenes like Charlize Theron’s psychosis a lá The Wrong Man, The uncomfortable prologue concerning a case of abuse, or most of John Milton’s monologues once again mask the same yet subtle dark fantasies as though it aims to somehow make the real life horror be as strong and realistic (if suitably sidetracking) as anything obviously classic based. In fact one scene’s quote hangs a lantern so cleverly it is there when it broke the mold: “You know what scares me? I quit this case, she gets better, I hate her for it”. It’s almost as if this movie knows that it would rather be a good courtroom drama and a bad horror film than be a bad film by failing to combine both genres. Of course you would think that Al Pacino’s borderline parodic performance (given the movie he won the Oscar for) would make that so. Up until the bitter climax that’s exactly what I was anticipating. It was thanks to his climactic speech (which held the memorable quote “Did you know there are more people in law school than lawyers walking the Earth?”) that I realized there were two kinds of Movies which 1995’s The Day of The Beast inspired: End of Days and The Devil’s Advocate.
Make no mistake, there’s almost as much cg in this as there was in the aforementioned Arnold Swarzenegger vehicle. It’s just saved by the very cliche that took me by surprise even though it shouldn’t have: the obvious denouement to every 90s horror flick. The reason it works here is simple and as I’ve previously mentioned: if this wasn’t a good horror movie it was certainly a clever courtroom drama at least. You could certainly tell that Al Pacino was having the time of his life from the moment we’re quietly introduced to his final saucy scene. I don’t want to say it’s underrated, but as someone who has also seen Constantine, I at least can’t say it’s overrated either.