Evil's Height of Folly
CLASSIFICATION MC Mature Catholics
RATING One of Five Stars
Distributed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (released in the United States on 26 May 2009; in Italy on 26 August 2009; in Japan on 24 October 2009)
90 minutes
The Film
The Devil’s Tomb is a horror film directed by Jason Connery and written by Keith Kjornes. It is a direct-to-video film.
The Preview
The Story
The film starts with a November/December 2008 video of Dr. Lee Wesley (Ron Perlman) recounting their activities and professional observations on the events that involv their works, and an experiment gone haywire, in an archaeological discovery inside a hidden research station womewhere in the Middle Eastern desert.
Meanwhile a team of seven elite mercenaries, contracted by the CIA and headed by Capt. Mack (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), prepares for departure from an unknown desert location. CIA Agent Dr. Elissa Cartel (Valerie Cruz) briefs the team on a search-and-rescue operation to extract Dr. Wesley, the agent’s father.
On the way to the dig, Mach remembers (first of the many flashbacks on his past missions) his time with best friend Blakely during the War. As the helicopter nears the area, a heavy sandstorm discended on them and forced them to take the ground and walk their way to the site.
Inside the underground facility, the team faces no resistance. Yoshi (Stephanie Jacobson) proceeds to check the nearby quarters when someone attacks her from behind. The attacker is a blisters-covered Vatican priest named Father Jacobi who is in critical medical condition. Dr. Sarah Harrington (Taryn Manning), know as Doc, suspects the blisters to have come from radioactive exposure. Cartel also notices signs of people walking around not far from their location through an internal detector system. Click (Brandon Fobbs) takes over the computer system to start decrypting the files of the so-named Gehenna Project. Meanwhile Doc unsuccessfully tried to help the priest breath better with his lungs filled with green mucus.
Nickels (Zack Ward) takes over the computer system as Click joins the rest of the team to search for the subject in the lower levels. Tremors greet them below. Bloody handprints litters the walls as Hammer and Yoshi lead the search party.
Mack challenges a shadow they noticed moving, only to face a glaze-eyed man who claims being called by many names except Wesley. He proceeded to talk about Doc’s uncertain search for identity and religion. Doc is stunned when the stranger referred to her by her full name.
The stranger also offers them to shed their blood for the remission of sin. He spits a corrossive fluid at Hammer as Mack reacted to take the stranger down. Meanwhile, Doc administers to the wounded stranger, lying on the ground, and sees him change into the face of her sister, her once patient that Doc failed to save and bore the guilt from then on.
As they move to check teh area farther, they find a dead man with a large wound in the rear side of the head, and a Latin inscription written on the wall–”HSPECTATA UT ABYSSUS” (Welcome to Hell). When they get back to see Doc, she and the stranger are nowhere to be found.
They move to the third lower level, and enter a locked power room with a charred man holding a power switch. They also find another man dead and bound in wires. Cartel hears Wesley’s voice, and moves into an office with a Wesley video playing. Their tracker find movements 100 feet from them, in the storage room.
Yoshi and Marcus Hicks (Jason London) stay in that room watching the video as the rest of the team move on and encounter once again the stranger, now with no trace of the gun-bullet wounds.
When Mack asks him about Doc, the stranger replies she is no longer Mack’s soldier. The man strips his upper garment, revealing a wound cut in the form of an upright cross running from his chest to his belly, and offers them salvation without rules. Mack shots him at the head, dropping him on the floor, but still manages to stand up. So Hammer sprays him with bullets until his body cannot stand up for the damage. Despite that remains of the man laying on the floor remains conscious somehow.
Mack has a bad feeling about something is wrong in what their dealing with, and suspects that Cartel withholds them important information to explain the events. While arguing, a noise came from a side door. Another Catholic priest, pale and wounded, appears. Cartel identifies him as Father Jacob Fulton (Henry Rollins), a member of Wesley’s team. He tells Cartel that he last saw Wesley in the Temple, where Doc may have been taken. Mack forces the priest to lead them to the Temple. The priest warns them that all they can find there is despair.
Meanwhile, in the second level office of Wesley, Yoshi is watching the video (as Hicks went out to look around) when she heard a girl’s voice calling her. She follows the girl’s voice and Yoshi finds a girl holdling the teddy bear given to Yoshi by her mother. The girl tells her that she never gave her a teddy bear or birthdays. Then suddenly the girl’s face turned into something hideous.
In the first level, Nickels mans the computer system while watching a pornographic magazine. Then a nude woman calls him to follow her. When he catches up with her, she turns into another man full of blisters who attacks Nickels. Nickels stabs him with a knife but the man does not even slow down. The man pins Nickels into the wall and kills him.
Below, the team proceeds to look for the Temple when Click noticed something in the left corridor. Inside a room he finds Doc who wants him to free her from the room. She tells him not to trust Cartel. Unknowingly, another blistered man silently approaches him from the side and attacks him. Mack fires just in time to take the attacker down. Doc disappears. Hammer covers at the rare as more blistered mes came out to attack them. Hammer throws a backpack full of C4, and hastily leaves the area to rejoin the team as the C4 detonates.
Inside the Temple, they found ancient documents scatteredon a working table. Hammer, who knows Latin, reads the so-called “testaming from the fall,” which tells that the writer saw an angel fall from heaven. Meanwhile, Click wanders int a vat containing a man suspended in fluid who moves his head towards Click. Panic-stricken, Click calls the others and complains on teh coldness in the place. Mack confirms the coldness, and traces it into a room nearby.
When the team is busy looking around, Yoshi again hears the call of the girl, and follows her only to find Doc, already covered with blisteres. Doc seduces and kisses her. Doc then cuts her back along the vertebral bones.
Meanwhile the team manages to open the steel-doored tomb, withi freezing temperature, that contains a creature, called “Nephilim,” an angel cast from Heaven. The priest, ever-agitated, explains of Genesis telling of “sons of God who came into Earth assuming human forms and corrupted mankind.” He warns them that the spirit will attack them through hallucinations of loved ones like a wife, a lover, a child… It is at this mention that Hicks notices that Yoshi is not with them.
Mack orders Hammer and Hicks to get Yoshi. Blister-covered Doc attacks Hammer, and Hicks turns against Hammer, believing that Doc is still with them. Hammer warns Hicks that Doc is with the enemy but Hicks will not listen. As Doc neared him, Hammer fires at her and runs away.
Doc apparently disappeared so Hicks continues looking for Yoshi, and finds her in a clinic. She asks his help and tells him abotu the girl. She shows Hicks here severed back bones. Suddenly Yoshi blows at Hicks green slimy fluids and Doc, lurking behind, attacks Hicks, severing his neck bone.
Back in the Temple, Father Fulton discovers that Cartel’s purpose for going there is to access Kahana, the bomb-incinerator system. After telling every one about this, he hastily left. The soldiers now realize that the real mission is to keep Wesley below instead of extracting him. And that Cartel has activated Kahana while they were still in the first level, unwittingly through the hacking skills of Click without him realizing what’s going on. And they have 29:32 minutes left on the clock.
Cartel tells them that Wesley is the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rolled into one, and she was trained since childhood to do what she is to do. She is a member of Wesley’s group, identified through the pendant that bears the markings “Angelus Domini.”
Mack calls through the radio informing his men that they have 15 minutes to leave the place. The possessed scrambles to attack them, and took down Hicks. As they head hout, they find Wesley in a room. Then, Hicks now possessed enters, attacking Click, but drops down in Mack’s bullets. The possessed Fr. Jacobi reappears, attacks and subdies Click.
Wesley attacks Mack. Cartel stabs Wesley with a knife but Wesley just shurgs it off. Then Wesley proposes to take over Mack because his time inside the possessed body is running out. The demon in Wesley’s body attempts to tempt Mack by showing him the women in Mack’s life–his wife who left him and his grown up daughter that he never saw–in an attempt to break his spirit. Then his best friend Blakely (Ray Winstone) appears (Mack killed him during the war having been ordered by his superiors to do so, and without questions asked). The spirit threatens to possess his loved ones instead if Mack does not agree to be possessed. As his chances diminish, Mack fires at the fuel container behind Wesley, who is consumed in the fire.
Carel moves to the charred body of the dying Wesley, and silently gives her consent to be possessed. She tells Mack that her mission is to free his father’s soul by taking into her the spirits possessing Wesley. And she decides to be incinerated so that the spirits will have not body to possess that will take them to the surface.
The film closes with Mack racing against time away from the underground facility just in time before the explosion destroys the laboratory and takes him unconscious. A rescue helicopter picks him up and flies him away into the horizon. He discoverse a new mission as he holds the only remaining medal that has the inscription Angelus Domini. Mack narrates that this will be his new mission.
The Review
The Devil’s Tomb toys with the idea of a man containing into himself the evil spirits to keep them away from other people. Kjornes made this idea run by introducing a myth that the fallen angels cast from Heaven into the world must take on human body and cannot spread evil without that body. So, the logic goes: if you can destroy teh possessed body, you can contain the demons.
One interesting part of this story is the idea of a secret group, led by Wesley, who committed their lives to become vessels of evil spirits in order to stop these spirits from spreading … in the story, by blowing the underground facility with the possessed people trapped inside.
While classified as a horror movie, it is more gory than horrifying. As a film and as a story it has good things to be happy about as well as very serious and numerous shortcomings.
Faith changes who we are and vice versa. This statement spoken through the demon possessing Doc unexpectedly uttered something profound to think about–”Sometimes our faith changes who we are; sometimes who we are changes our faith.” The film thus proposes the idea that our faith can be as dynamic as ourselves, and any radical changes in either can affect both. Spoken from the greatest of liars, this thought may be contrary to the lying words expected of demons. But considering that these angels are willing to reveal themselves as angels of light, it is not far off that they can speak some truths like God’s angels. The idea however can elicit deep thoughts from viewers, making it a plus for Kjornes.
Blood must be shed for the remission of sin. Another deceptively correct statement again comes out from the lips of an evil spirit–”If there is no shedding of blood, there can be no true remission (of sins).” That accurately reflects the meaning of the Lord’s sacrifice, and the theological reason behind it. But the catch phrase in the devil’s version of this is that the blood to be shed is no other than yours. A classic mockery of Christian truths expected among demons, this time targeted on the bloody sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. It is another plus for Kjornes.
Guilt is not a sin. Thus says another lying demon in Wesley. Mack apparently felt guilty for killing his best friend on his superior’s direct order. The catch however is that Mack may only have a sinless guilt when he is suffering from spiritual scrupulosity (looking at almost everything you do as sinful), which most of the time, are temptations too. Or, when his conscience is so hardened that it no longer feels guilt for each evil deed committed. Otherwise, genuine guilt indicates an underlying sin. So if Mack feels true guilt on the murder, the devil, by revealing that, foolishly brings the matter of Mack’ s guilt into light instead, giving him the chance to repent from it, and gain conversion. It is a foolish demon who does that. The idea is a minus for Kjornes.
Chill may indicate demonic presence. Christians who have frequent encounters with demons, such as exorcists, agrees that a significant drop of temperature occurs in the area where an evil presence appears. The chill did not come from the ice-like protective sheets of the Devil’s tomb. But you cannot help but notice the swirling frosty cloud inside the tomb. It is a plus for the correctness of the chill interpretation but it is a spoof on refrigeration that can be noted visually.
Aside from these intellectually interesting insights, the film suffers from serious defects both in its story and directing in addition to what has already been mentioned above.
Problems in the storytelling include but not limited to badly developed characters (e.g., lack of background stories and badly written script), illogical character decision-making (e.g. the possessed persons prefers not to leave the facility when they can just take the elevators), and factual errors (e.g. Doc refers Hebrews 9:22 as a book in the Old Testament).
As a horror film, direction fails to make it horrifying although it can make viewers puke with sheer grossness.
The Nephilim. The idea of the fallen angels taking on human forms came from ancient pseudoepigraphic works (written by an unknown author but attributed to someone better known) such as the Jewish Life of Adam and Eve and other similar literature. The film identifies the fallen angels as the Nephilims, which is one of the interpretations from this literature on the biblical “fall of angels.” Another interpretation is that Nephilims are offspring of the sons of Seth (Adam’s third son; next to Abel) and the daughters of Cain (Adam’s firstborn).
Christian traiditon however doubts the authenticity of htese writings because it was written much later (between 200 BC and 200 AD) compared to the certainties found in the Biblical canon. Any writer of great imagination can write the same story believably.
“Restraint” of the Devil. The movie tells that the ice-like restraint of the Nephilim is not ice but “the hand of God.” This indicates the confusion of the screenwriter with Christian teachings on evil spirits as similar to those found in pseudoepigraphic works. First, the film proposes that God fears the release of evil in the human race; thus the restrain. While the angelic fall is a fact of faith, God’s infinite wisdom sees and makes full use of these fallen angels instead in strengthening the faith of God’s people. Second, the viciousness of the possessed lab personnel (i.e., killing people) is an idea that came from the viciousness of Nephilim as reported by pseudoepigraphical writings (e.g. prone to killing and incest). Christian teaching holds that no action on the part of evil spirits can happen without the providential consent of God. In addition, evil spirits cannot take any human life; they can only tempt humans to kill, but they themselves cannot kill. This means that when a devil possesses a human body it is foolish to look at them killing humans.
The Devil is dependent on human body. The film proposes that demons have to possess human bodies before they can destroy mankind. It is a myth-making idea that is far off the Christian teachings. As mentioned above, the evil spirits do not have to possess human body to sow destraction among humans. Temptations of anger, jealousy, and cravings for wealth have led people and nations to kill. While the film suggests that the people in the surface are still “free” from the supposedly most wicked of devils (the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), it runs counter to what we can actually see around the world. Even without seeing spirits of darkness, the pain, the sadness, the conflict, the famine, the killings, and more belies the absence of these evil spirits “among humans in the surface.” If the these Horsemen are inside Wesley underneath the earth’s surface, who are the devils causing war, famine, and the likes around the world? The evil of war in Mack’s flashbacks belies the presence of the Horseman of War, for example, inside the underground lab.
Suicide is an option. The most dangerous proposition thrown by the film is the idea that suicide is an option. It wrongly proposes that the spiritual cost of suicide is worth the price paid to gain the nobility of sacrificing oneself to save mankind. It’s a sense of grandeur cloacked with social responsibility. It is actually the cardinal sin Pride, acting the act–sacrificing one’s soul (the chance of seeing the glory of God?) just to make the person feel better having saved the world. For Christians, suicide is NEVER an option.
Green slimy what? The use of green slimy spits as a way used by the possessed in attacking the un-possessed is a common tool used in extraterrestrial and evil-dead horror movies. But in this movie, it makes no sense. It may be corrosive, but then what for? Why green, and not, say, ink-black? And there is no scientific explanation proposed to explain why is that so. It is not even clear if it can cause infection (unless the movie espouses “possession by infection”). It looks gross though (maybe that’s all it is about).
Are they blisters or cancerous growth? The film appears to propose that evil spirits bring with them blister-causing infection. Why? No explanation given. The blisters in possessed personnel at times look like cancerous growth in their mutational peak. But the movie fails to again explain why. Are the Nephilims radioactive? Can possession makes mutation to happen? (This is a more reasonable explanation and can be justified with scientific myths.) The least that the author should have done, but failed, is to give the reason for these growths’ appearance.
Evil in the height of its folly. Another illogical flow in the story is teh failure of the foursome demons possessing Wesley to instead make him leave the facility with his minions on the tow and spread terror on the surface instead of waiting for Mack to come. The reasons why they can: (1) The supposed goal is to destroy mankind on the surface (the only way to do that is just to go there and not hang around waiting for Mack to come); (2) Wesley has the access codes of the facility and he can change these codes anytime (so there’s no way the possessed cannot leave the place); (3) Wesley’s body is nearing its limit of functioning (so there is an inherent urgency that the place must be abandoned as early as they can; and they can do it anytime).
Kjornes justify this decision to stay put by making Mack to appear a “chosen” vessel of the devil because he follows orders without question. It is where it becomes ridiculous. It simply implies that these demons cannot persuade those who ask questions. It surely insults Mack’s intelligence, and the demons foolishly assume that they can persuade mack by insultling him. But, despite the evil spirits’ superior intelligence, who can say they are not foolish? Rebelling against God is one proof for that.
The Verdict
The Devil’s Tomb has obvious redeeming features despite its dismal writing and directing performance. Cuba, Ron, and Ray are doing well in their roles despite teh great shortcomings inherent in less developed characters. For Christians, it can be an interesting introduction to ancient writings which teh Catholic Church considers unreliable to be included in the official canon of the Scriptures. Its proposition on suicide however is dangerous if it cannot be processed correctly by the viewers. It is a kind of film that you watch to pick what is good and discard the rest. Its goriness and lewdness though cannot be recommended for the young and less table in their faith.
Reviewed by Zosimo Literatus
(Part of this review appears in the September issue of M Newsmagazine.)
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