First five minutes a frightening foreword and a final five minutes of freaky frisson, DIABOLIC has an eighty minute centre as soggy as sago.
Watching this Australian made movie masquerading as an American horror show, one at first surrenders to its premise, then rages at its ponderousness, and finally compromises on boredom before a rallying cry of bloody carnage finale wakes one from their stupor.
DIABOLIC follows Elise, played by Elizabeth Cullen, a woman who joins a healing ceremony led by the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints to cure her mysterious blackouts.
This is a decade after she was subjected to a baptism of the dead ritual, a bat shit mad Mormon concept where young women are christened on behalf of the dead. When the name Larue was invoked, all hell broke loose.
Elise’s lesbian leanings to the Bishop’s daughter is discovered and she is excommunicated. She goes on to marry in heteronormative manner a seemingly caring Adam, who is heteronormatively screwing her best female friend, Gwen.
The film stars John Kim as Elise’s husband, Adam, and Mia Challis as her best friend, Gwen, who has the best line in the movie, a barbed comment about lack of consent in institutionalised religion.
Genevieve Mooy lends a commanding presence as Alma, a Mormon magic mushroom mom and Robin Goldsworthy grists what he can from the overmilled script as her flaky son, Hyrum.
Written by Mike Harding and Daniel J. Phillips and directed by Phillips, DIABOLIC combines both elements of the Witch and Possession sub-genres of horror, told through the lens of a woman trying to recover her memory.
How many cliches does it take to bore a movie?
