The biggest battle between good and evil is about to take place through the eyes of a young woman during the night of her 23rd birthday. In ‘The Vatican Tapes’, Angela Holmes (Olivia Taylor Dudley) is a young woman on the cusp of a great life. She has a beautiful home, a loving boyfriend (John Patrick Amedorl), and an army coloniel father (Dougray Scott) who would do anything to protect her. She begins to have a devastating effect visible to those closest to her, causing serious injury and death. Holmes is examined and possession is suspected, but when the Vatican is called upon to exorcise the demon, the possession proves to be an ancient satanic force more powerful than ever imagined. It’s all up to Father Lozano (Michael Pena) to wage war for more than just Angela’s soul, but for the world as we know it. The plot of this film sounds like more than enough to maybe produce a sleeper hit for the Summertime season, even so much as not needing a found footage resolution to garner cheap thrills to it’s audience, and instead opting for the movie style of realtime shooting. So where does it all go wrong? EVERYTHING. This movie is without a pulse, just like it’s main protagonist. The movie borders on directionless ground with many of the scares essentially coming out of nowhere with very little to no build. This results in a lack of anything serious to pull out a scare or shriek from it’s audience. In fact, many of the films possession scenes are played off in such a ridiculous manner that i couldn’t help but laugh from the obsurdity and underwhelming acting from a cast of mostly veteran Hollywood actors. Scott and Djimoun Honsou are almost non existent in their portrayals. The movie needed some veteran leadership that it never found, and it felt to me at least that these two had very little interest to be in the film. Pena is definitely the best part of the movie, but it’s hard to fully grasp him as a man of the cloth with some of the roles in his recent films. For now, he will be typecast as a comedic clown, and it’s unfortunate because a movie like this was really his best chance at breaking out of the mold. I mentioned before that the movie didn’t do the found footage gimmick, and this is true all until the final half hour of the movie when we see that a lot of these scenes are afterwards being watched on a surveillance style kind of camera. Who is watching these? It’s never really made clear. I mean, i know they are being presented to the audience, but that is one of many ways to make your movie painfully obvious in the self aware field. The ending to the movie feels like it is trying to get preachy about the people in our own world who we are ready to write off as profits. The message is very jumbled and not exactly coherent, and we are left with a final image that feels like another twenty minutes are coming, somewhere just beyond the credits. It never happens, and it all sums up the 83 minutes of time wasted. ‘The Vatican Tapes’ is another failed experiment in possession films. A genre that has long since reached it’s peak for cinematic creativity in 2005’s ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’. In that film, we were treated to a courtcase drama, as well as a possession film. This movie offered nothing original, and even mocks many scenes from past movies that were done a hundred times better. It’s all so poorly done that Director Mark Neveldine (The Crank movies) better thank his lucky stars that the ‘Scary Movie’ franchise isn’t what it was ten years ago, because this movie screams and points to be made fun of. Don’t waste your time on such poorly made chuck.

2/10