It’s three different takes on selling your soul to the devil, and each one has some fun, evil moments.
GATES OF FLESH (2025)
I love a good infectious possession movie, and this one definitely delivers on that. We don’t learn much about how the possession began, but in an effort to escape it, a group of friends hides out in a church.
You would think no one could get possessed in a church, but this movie seems to reflect our current society—evil keeps overpowering good!
It’s glowing eyes, veiny skin, and devilish grins galore as those that become possessed taunt and terrorize those that haven’t been infected, spilling their dirty secrets and turning the friends against each other.
One dude who has awesome Johnathon Schaech mouth goes all in on delivering a sinister possessed persona, and as a result, he ends up resembling Johnathon Schaech playing a zombie in Day of the Dead: Bloodline.
Other than that, the film delves into themes of religion, sin, redemption, and all that crap. It takes itself seriously instead of going the playful Evil Dead route, which kind of drags it down a bit. It’s simply not as exciting an experience as it could have been despite the awesome possession faces and some intense moments here and there.
THE DEVIL’S TRAP (2023)
I’m not usually a fan of religious horror, but this one focuses more on dealing with the Devil, and there are some pretty damn creepy elements to it, even if most of the freaky parts are delusions characters are experiencing.
A young, paralyzed man is brought into a hospital and gets an ailing Bruce Dern as a roommate.
Meanwhile, the staff and guests in the hospital begin to experience supernatural occurrences, and they start dying off in mysterious ways. That includes Richard Grieco, who plays one of the people on staff.
Things get really satanic when Michael Paré comes in as a priest to do some sort of exorcism on Bruce Dern, after which Dern falls into a coma.
Before long, the paralyzed dude seems to make a psychic connection with Dern, seeing the horrors Dern experienced as a child (warning: it includes killing a dog). The young guy decides he needs to team up with his sister to help Dern really exorcise his demons.
There’s not much more I can say about the film without giving it away, but it is a commentary on the evils of cancer and sickness and how illness always seems to prey on the innocent. The one major flaw is that despite a whole lot of crazy shit happening throughout the course of the film, it takes a long monologue by Dern near the end to literally spell out exactly what has been happening so that the audience will understand, because the truth does not sufficiently unfold within the events of the film.
THE DEVIL’S VOID (2022)
As derivative as this film is, it just keeps throwing little curveballs at us to try to make the final twist seem surprising. Where it does succeed is in switching from a relatively simple demonic possession vibe to a totally hokey supernatural TV show look and feel in the final act, like, out of nowhere.
There’s a lot going on here. There is a podcasting crew that debunks hauntings and is looking for a juicy story to draw in more listeners.
There’s an old lady selling her house who gets taken in by a real estate agent.
There’s the real estate agent’s medium mom, who seeks out the podcasters and invites them to the old lady’s house for a séance because a murder supposedly took place there.
There’s a detective whose wife died, and he ends up at the house for the séance.
There are a couple of campers who also end up at the house for the séance.
It’s messy, but signs of possession show up early on with some classic glowing eyes. The characters begin to act weird and seem to have dirty secrets. None of it ever makes much sense or comes together, and the characters never seem to react with even an ounce of shock when weird shit starts to happen.
In the final act, a demon woman suddenly appears, and she just starts killing people. Then a male demon appears. Then there’s a magical sword and shield, a brief battle with a demon creature, and cheesy special effects. It’s the best part of the whole movie, and so right out of a Buffy episode.
And finally, we get the big twist reveal that I totally saw coming from a mile away.