In the annals of demonic possession films, The Deliverance should surely go down as one of the worst, but, it has the redeeming quality of having made me burst out laughing every time I recall some stray scene, which is probably too often for my sanity to withstand if it doesn’t stop within the week.
For instance, I’m laughing now as I recall Omar Epps trying seriously to act like he was romantically interested in a ghetto-grandma Glenn Close while she’s literally receiving chemotherapy. Both Epps and Close are great actors, but this meaningless subplot never goes anywhere, which isn’t surprising since it had no reason to be there in the first place.
The movie is based on the Ammons Haunting case, which happened in Gary, Indiana in 2011. Paranormal investigator Zak Bagans bought the house, and in 2018, after hamming it up with the locals and tearing the house down, he released the documentary Demon House, which, for all its obvious chicanery, still managed to stick largely to the Ammons story and present some real interviews.
The Deliverance doesn’t even try. It is a pure work of fiction with only a few passing references to the events of the Ammons case. Unlike The Conjuring movies, we aren’t following dramatized versions of the real-life people, but made-up characters loosely based on those people.
Very loosely based, I hope. The Deliverance depicts a case where it would make more sense for the demon to flee the family.
Andra Davis, as the mother, motherfuckers her way through the movie with a panache that would make Sam Jackson proud. She smacked her kids around, and even beat up their bullies, as if to say: only I’m allowed to hit my kids! The character never becomes likeable or believable, but that’s the script’s fault, not Andra’s, who, like the socioeconomically disadvantaged single mom she played, really was trying her best.
I’m not sure what Lee Daniels was really going for here. The movie starts out as a sort of soap-opera-in-the-slums and then ratchets up into a series of poorly connected demonic possession and exorcism cliches, as if they were an afterthought.
This movie was so bad, I was compelled to commit a sin even greater than losing the two hours I spent watching it. I revisited The Exorcist II: The Heretic to see if I could finally relieve John Boorman’s 1977 flop of the ignominious title of being the worst such movie ever made.
But no. No, The Heretic is even shittier than I remembered it, and even more absurdly disjointed than the slapdash, but delightfully Vaudevillian race to an anticlimax that was The Deliverance.
I don’t know why I do this to myself, dear reader, though I must admit I’ve laughed more in the last two days than I have in many months, even if for all the wrong reasons.
If you already have Netflix, there’s no reason not to watch The Deliverance, but don’t expect anything on the level of The Conjuring, let alone The Exorcist.
