Found footage flick treads a tired path

Director William Brent Bell jumps on the rickety Paranormal Activity bandwagon with a found footage horror styled as a documentary about exorcisms.

“The Vatican did not endorse this film, nor aid in its completion,” declares the opening title card.

Nor, it seems, did a screenwriter capable of crafting fully-fledged protagonists and realistic dialogue.

We’re always several paces ahead of the characters as they blunder towards disaster, their whimpers and screams captured on three cameras that have been placed fortuitously in just the right spots to document each chilling encounter.

Twenty years after her mother disappeared following her exorcism which ended in tragedy, film-maker Isabella (Andrade) heads to Rome to better understand the dark forces that supposedly took hold of her mother.

The Devil Inside commits the cardinal sin of forgetting to scare the living daylights out of the audience.

There are a couple of cheap scares, but dramatic momentum is pedestrian and exorcism sequences tick off a checklist of horror tropes – levitation, painful bodily contortions, speaking in tongues.

The spry running time feels considerably longer than 83 minutes,