But for the most part, Dudley is the only thing worth hanging on to in 'The Vatican Tapes.' Dudley's performance isn't interesting unto itself, but Neveldine is constantly trying to find new ways to get viewers to examine her face, as if he were presenting her to a surgery theater, and wanted us to admire the generic features of Possessed Girl #15647.

There are some eccentric jolts along the way, including a neat-looking car crash filmed from inside the wrecked vehicle, and a scene of grisly (though largely implied) violence involving two light bulbs. Neveldine and screenwriter Christopher Borrelli take their time getting there, but really, the road to Angela's reluctant meet-up with Cardinal Bruun is like a day trip across Utah: flat, smooth, and largely featureless. After all, in what other context is it ok for four adult men to sequester a young woman who exhibits all the signs of mental illness, and force her to eat a Eucharist while filming her.right before they chain her to a nearby wall? If you buy a ticket for 'The Vatican Tapes,' you should be anticipating Angela's transformation into a demonically-possessed entity who speaks fluent Aramaic and sounds suspiciously like Beavis of 'Beavis and Butthead' fame. You can't take 'The Vatican Tapes' seriously outside of the formulaic mold that 'The Exorcist' established decades ago. It's up to Father Lozano ( Michael Peña) to fetch the appropriate demon-busting help: Cardinal Bruun ( Peter Andersson), a no-nonsense Catholic who was possessed when he was 12 years old, and now fights demons that hide inside otherwise defenseless women's bodies.

Neither do the police, nor the doctors in the nearby hospital, not even the one psychiatrist ( Kathleen Robertson) who tries to get past Angela's defenses to get her to talk about her problems. That's what we came here to see, so it's not really a spoiler to say: Angela has got a demon inside her, and neither her gruff dad Roger ( Dougray Scott) nor her sensitive boyfriend Pete ( John Patrick Amedori) know how to help her. Events start predictably, save for the notable stylistic quirk that 'The Vatican Tapes,' a film whose title suggests a found-footage horror film, was actually frequently shot with the help of a tripod.

The vatican tapes movie review