DUFE

“Is everybody in?” Scott Derrickson, maker of Sinister, returns to likeable generic horror with, DELIVER US FROM EVIL (2014). Poor Eric Bana, though. His career, since Hulk and Troy, has lurched up or down without pause for consideration of whether he’s making bad choices. For every welcome change of pace, such as Time Traveller’s Wife, there is a vacuous or villainous part, in the likes of Abrams’ wholly misjudged Star Trek. Now it seems Bana is reduced to playing thankless cop-roles, yet he still faces anger-management issues, in DUFE; a sort of NYPD X-Files with exorcist havoc.

Three US marines, Iraqi war veterans dishonourably discharged, are in trouble with derangement - or possession, according to Latin clues, and the Doors are to blame for it all, apparently. After a night of weird goings-on at the Bronx zoo, specialist investigator ‘Radar’ Sarchie (Bana) finds his sixth-sense hunches prompt him to team-up with an unorthodox priest, on the trail of the soldiers turned into portals for demonic activity threatening city-wide anarchy. 

The urban gothic atmosphere of a classic bogeyman is this movie’s best asset. There’s much crazy fun to be had in the climax of strobes, screaming, subterfuge, and stigmata, where absolution for wrath in the past means choosing justice over vengeance in the present.

Some hysteria later, the inevitable happy ending to a crisis of malice from beyond feels like an epilogistic letdown. Derrickson moved far away from this picture’s gruesomely bizarre appeal to direct Benedict Cumberbatch in the superhero remake of Doctor Strange.