If the horror genre has something, it is that it is a very grateful audiovisual terrain: it does not require large budgets or stars to work wonderfully, as Blumhouse productions have demonstrated a thousand times. Nor technological boasts, since low lights suit him well and leaving the viewer a certain degree of uncertainty is usually even practical and evocative.
What is essential is that the script has good ideas and that, from the direction and editing, there is a certain talent to put them together in a successful way. In the case at hand, Devil’s weedthe script is based on a cliché and the execution is not brilliant at all.
So two major drawbacks come together for it to work as expected. It does not have elements that make it original, nor take it out of the realm of the predictable, and the execution is far from perfect because it is clear from the beginning that it is a fairly cheap film. But perhaps the worst thing is that going through the editing room has made the work worse instead of enriching it.
What is faithful to the trends is in resorting to many scares, seasoned with audio uploads to seek the immediate response to the stimulus in the viewer. If whoever reads us enjoys this type of proposals, here they will find the moment to jump a few times in their seats.
Mauro is an influencer on tour in Colombia with his representative Santiago, who works hard to take him from one place to another while he spends his time every night drinking huge amounts of alcohol and sharing a bed with many of his fans.
On the way to Cali they find a woman who has been left stranded with the car. Erika lives alone in a huge house in the middle of nowhere. And they go there to pick up the tools with which to repair her vehicle. However, as soon as they arrive, she is very hospitable and invites them to dinner. Both, dazed by the idea of seducing her, play along and decide to spend the night there.
Unfortunately for them, they are not predators, but prey. Érika hides a murky past and family secrets that will put their lives in danger.
Little to hold on to
Devil’s weed It is a fairly clumsy film from its approach. To begin with, no one will like the characters from whose point of view we follow the action: zero empathy for their fate. Without emotional hook, the only interesting thing is to see how events develop. They go a little off the rails than expected, to be honest.
And we find problems again: narrative type (the flashbacks fit seamlessly with the temporal evolution of the present), tonal (it goes from being a light story to getting into a drama that doesn’t suit it) and dosage of information (the explanations They are very discursive and come full force in the last minutes of footage).
It’s not that the performances are wonderful either. The self-confidence of Hamza Zaidi (Eight Moroccan surnames), his character is doing well, and he is still a brash person with charisma on social networks and predatory behavior, but the situations are implausible and the behavior of others is incongruous.
Lina Cardona does what she can with her character, but she has no chemistry with Max Marieges and, although the idea of a sequel is tempting, as the outcome suggests, it would have to have a much juicier script and more risk from the direction. She would need to get rid of the TV movie aspect and give the story a twist.
