should be "the goriest film you'll ever experience"

Rating: 1/10 (8 April 2013)

let me start by saying that i am easily scared by horror movies, i am the girl who sits there with her hands over her face, peeking out through the spaces in-between her fingers to watch a horror movie...and the only, and i mean ONLY, reason i covered my face in this movie was because it was so sickeningly gory and violent. i went into the theater not having seen the original, so i wasn't sure what to expect, but it was far from the most terrifying movie i'll ever see, that's for sure.
the back story, as boring and short-lived as it was, helped the movie transition into the bloodbath that it became, with the characters playing off Mia's weird behavior, in it's early stages, as withdraws (although vomiting blood on someone is NOT a symptom of drug withdraw)
the acting was awful...the characters were boring at best, and could have put anyone to sleep had they not been so grossed out. the only actor worth a damn in this whole flick was Lou Taylor Pucci, who took an ass beating and kept on kicking until the very end. Jane Levy's portrayal of Mia was decent, and decently creepy in some parts, but the rest of the cast was just....horrible. by the time everyone starting dying, i was actually glad - it was more torturous to watch them try to act than it was to watch them kill each other...which, come to think of it, could have been caused by the awful, and horribly corny, script, in which the characters have to act serious (and seriously scared) while trying to tend to wounds with duct tape, and convince the audience that someone with ZERO medical knowledge can fashion a working defibrillator out of a car battery, MORE duct tape, two needles and various other ridiculous items. my acting probably would have sucked too if i had to act like taping someone's severed arm with duct tape would do anything at all to prevent the inevitable bleed out.
which leads me to the overwhelming amount of violence and gore. it was over the top...laughable even (as a matter of fact, the man sitting in the row in front of us in the theater WAS laughing) because it just got to the point where there wasn't even a shred of shock factor anymore, it was just violence for violence's sake. there was no depth to it, no build up, nothing to really psychologically mess with the audience before grossing them out, it was just..there. it actually got boring, because everything literally just turned into a bloodbath (pun intended)..it was brutal and hard to watch, and the audience definitely grossed out, but it wasn't shocking, it became expected. the demon reminded me too much of the exorcist to actually be scary, it just seemed like they ripped off the look, the actions, and even some of the phrases from the exorcist and hoped it'd scare people.
overall...i wasn't impressed. over-the-top gore and violence does not qualify a movie as being "the most terrifying movie you'll ever experience"....it was far from it. had it really amped up the psychological scares and the build-up to the gore, then maybe we could talk, but a movie that relies solely on blood and guts is not terrifying, it just makes the audience want a barf bag.
i'll wait to see the directors cut (as some of the scenes in previews were not in the movie) to make another decision as i'm sure some of the truly unnerving scenes were left on the cutting room floor to allow for an R rating, but for now, it has nothing that you couldn't have seen if you mashed together Saw and The Exorcist.
in general, the scariest part of my movie-going experience was that someone brought their children, all 10 and under, to this gore-fest, and i had to sit in front of them for an hour and a half.