Just like yesterday, this is another movie that has been sitting in my Netflix queue for ages just waiting for me to finally watch it. Since the Horrortoberfest this year has been going to well, I figured a movie about a killer phone app must be able to get back on the track of watching some seriously terrible horror films. While the quality wasn’t exactly outstanding and it was very much a by-the-numbers modern horror movie; Bedeviled did at least deliver decent enough acting and action to not be an entirely awful film.

As so many movies of its kind do, Bedeviled starts with a teenage girl alone in her house when spooky things happen. After her death, her friends all get an invitation from her to download an app that has a personal assistant type guy called Mr. Bedeviled that can do all sorts of stuff for you like an evil SIRI. One-by-one each of the friends gets a fucked up thing where their greatest fear comes to life in some way and then blinks out of existence again. Eventually, they will start dying of fright.  The friend that is into computers figures out how to uninstall the program which makes you safe from the ghost/demon/whatever but he dies leaving only our main character still alive. But oh no! When she talks to her mom, it turns out that she downloaded the app! SPOOKY ENDING!

This was fairly formulaic but they at least tried to address a couple things that I was worried were just going to get glossed over. Such as how did the friend get the app in the first place since it took her dying for her friends to get an invite? It still didn’t really address what was going on with the app though. We are told that our technology is a two-way street so we can detect spirits with EMF readers but they can find us through phones somehow. Aside from that being some real stupid shit, the entity doesn’t really seem to have a goal besides killing people but it also seems entirely content to just fuck with some teenagers instead of spreading to everyone’s phones. It can also apparently effect the physical world (turning off lights, running the washing machine, etc.) but it needs to be on someone’s phone to kill them. What if I give my phone to someone else? If they own it are they the ones that are cursed or does the phone just spook its way back and only try to murder me? These types of movies always leave me with so many questions.

Aside from the plot, the rest of the movie was ok. The actors played scared teens well enough though there really wasn’t much in the way of development on any of them to really make you feel like they were fully fleshed out people. The practical effects that they used were great on the monsters that were just people. The few times the movie tried to do some CGI monster stuff, though, it really fell flat. It was either overly fake looking or seriously goofy or a combination there of. It’s a personal peeve of mine because if you don’t have the budget for high end CGI; a practical effect, even a cheaply made one, can look a million times better with just the right lighting and framing.

I’d give Bedeviled a 3 out of 5. It’s watchable but kind of ridiculous and relies entirely too much on jump scares.