Writer: Adrián García Bogliano
The very first scene in this film has two lesbians banging the hell out of each other. You can hardly imagine a more promising start of a movie, but things get better. After they've finished (and had a boring conversation no one cares about anyway), one of them goes down the stairs to answer the door, only to be brutally killed by an extremely large guy who cuts off a few of her fingers in the process. Her girlfriend then comes down and hits the killer in the head with a heavy object, so he gets really pissed off and leaves. The dying girls murmurs something about "his eyes" before shuffling off this mortal coil. You may think there's hardly a more promising beginning to a movie than a lesbian sex followed by a murder, but it gets better.
The killer, still in a bit of a knockdown, manages to get to a nearby mountaintop, where he opens a sack out of which falls a myriad of severed fingers (!). Then he removes his clothes and proceeds with doing what suspiciously looks like a sexual intercourse. With the ground. Yep. A bit later, apparently on the same mountain, we find a nice little Mexican family with two young children. They spend some time there and then leave, but the kids (a boy and a girl, by the way) want to go back for some reason, so the parents let them go so they can have some hot sex in the car. The parents, not the kids, you sick bastards. The mother gives her daughter a wristwatch and warns her that they have to be back in an hour. Surely, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, as you might have imagined, the kids don't return (surprise, surprise!), the parents are pissed off at each other and some unpleasant family stuff comes to the surface etc. But lo and behold, the following day the kids are back, perfectly unharmed, their whereabouts and doings remaining a mystery. Which, by the way, is not very surprising, as absolutely no one bothered to, you know, ask them where they were. Anyway, long story short, the kids are apparently alright, but soon strange things start happening (details of which will remain undisclosed in this review), and that prompts the mother to think that there might be something wrong with the children. (Cheesy announcer mode on:) What she will discover is that the truth is more horrifying than anything she might have imagined (cheesy announcer mode off).
The screenplay of this film is rather uneven. On one hand, the parts with the (apparently children-related) strange phenomena leave a lot to be desired. We see absolutely nothing we haven't already seen in many ghost movies. Hardly anything interesting happens about that. On the other hand, the movie compensates for that in some rather unexpected places. For example, the parents discover the whereabouts of a guy whom they suspect might have sexually assaulted the kids and they decide to pay him a night visit. Suffice it to say that it ends in a pretty surprising way.
The story is made on the anything-goes principle, many things are not well explained, some of them are downright illogical and in general it all doesn't make much of a sense. I'm certainly no logic Nazi and I thought a good mysterious atmosphere was more than enough compensation, but still many people will probably see this as a serious fault.
To me much bigger problem were the kids. It seems as if the director had never seen The Omen, otherwise he would have known how a scary kid looks like. These two are not a tiny bit scary, if anything they look more drugged than demon-possessed or something. Don't let that chase you away from the movie, though. With all its faults, Here Comes the Devil is a very nice movie whose atmosphere and occasional extreme weirdness fully compensate for certain shortcomings. Actually, I lied in the first paragraph. Lesbian sex is much better than murder, cutting off fingers and raping the ground.
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