History has shown that horror movies don’t need to find anything even remotely resembling universal acclaim to succeed, but based on the talent gathered together to craft 2014’s Deliver Us from Evil, both critics and audiences were expecting much better.
Sure, the supernatural thriller earned a respectable $88 million at the box office on a $30 million budget to turn a tidy little profit, but respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of 29 and 42 percent from the aforementioned sides of the divide was hardly in keeping with a stacked roster on either side of the camera.
Directed by horror veteran Scott Derrickson and produced by the incomparable Jerry Bruckheimer, Eric Bana’s veteran New York cop forms a tenuous alliance with Edgar Ramirez’s charismatic and rebellious priest in order to crack a chilling case that may or may not have connections to the demonic – although you can probably guess whether or not there really are otherworldly forces at play.
Olivia Munn, Joel McHale, and Sean Harris are all hugely accomplished and reliable performers, but despite their best efforts Deliver Us from Evil never manages to get out of second gear. There are some suitably gnarly practical effects, to be fair, but it feels like a collection of fleetingly impressive parts, when all the ingredients were there for a cohesively terrifying whole.
Of course, being a horror flick available at the push of a button, streaming subscribers have been going gaga for the disappointing Deliver Us from Evil nonetheless. Per FlixPatrol, it can currently be found as the sixth most-watched feature on Hulu’s charts, because jump scares never go out of fashion on-demand.