Ramirez, shaggy enough to be the Serpico of exorcists but exuding calm wisdom instead of obsessive determination, makes faith look cool. While the supernatural side of the film suffers a flaw or two - continued references to The Doors are superfluous and sometimes chuckle-inducing - its central conflict works. Bulked-up McHale, who acquits himself well in action scenes, gets the kind of jadedly quippy dialogue one can easily imagine him parodying on Community Munn’s part could have been scripted by cut-and-pasting any of a hundred other neglected-policeman’s-wife characters. The investigation yields some appreciably icky encounters with putrefying corpses and deranged prisoners, which is good considering the sometimes-flimsy cop-movie stuff that surrounds the scares.

LIST The Hollywood Reporter Reveals Hollywood’s 100 Favorite Films ( Olivia Munn, playing Sarchie’s wife, tries to comfort the poor girl, but the film ratchets up her bump-in-the-night torment.) Poltergeist-y aftereffects haunt the places and people he has visited - even Sarchie, who is plagued by shock-cut hallucinations and whose house has become a very scary place for his young daughter. Maybe, the lapsed-Catholic cop starts to worry, the man they’re hunting really is possessed.Įnjoyably, this particular case isn’t limited to one spirit-controlled victim terrorizing his family and friends. Only after other crimes prove to share both tangible connections (tracing to three Marines who had a disturbing encounter during the Iraq war) and supernatural overtones does Sarchie admit there may be something to this chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking priest’s claim. Still, Sarchie is ready to write the mother off as a garden-variety psycho even when a Jesuit priest, Ramirez’s Mendoza, shows up to insist on a more complicated explanation.

But an incident in which a deranged mother threw her toddler into the Bronx Zoo’s lion pit is juicier than usual, with a mysterious, blood-stained bystander disrupting the investigation before vanishing. Sarchie, a cop who covers the South Bronx with partner Butler ( Joel McHale), is proud of an internal “radar” that steers him away from mundane radio calls and toward the juicy cases.

Deliver us from evil 2014 true story