THATFILMGUY

Demons Never Die centres around a group of kids who, after a young girl commits suicide, decide to form a suicide pact and take their lives together. However, a masked killer starts killing them in brutal ways, effectively doing the very thing they wanted to do in the first place. As each of the group gets killed, the remaining people try to avoid death while trying to figure out which of the group is the killer (wait, how do they know it’s one of the group? This is in London, a city of nearly 8 million people, and you still are certain that it’s one of your group!?)

The plot of Demons Never Die is laughable. Why would we want these kids to survive when they planned to die anyway? I like the idea of making a British Scream, but this is more like one of those 90s slasher flicks that tried to imitate the success of Scream by re-creating it’s ˜hip’ cast. It stars Tulisa Contostavlos, singer in the hip-hop group N-Dubz, and it’s plain that it’s trying to get the fans in to just see her. It seems, however, that acting is not her calling (well, neither is singing, but I digress). She’s so wooden it makes Taylor Launter look like Brian Blessed. Other B-list British celebrities in Demons Never Die that make the cast include Radio 1 DJ Reggie Yates, rapper Ashley Walters (or ˜Asher D’), and Hollyoaks actress Emma Rigby. It feels like a vehicle for it’s cast and none of them do a good job.

Demons Never Die suffers from the problem a lot of teen slasher films do: relying to heavily on the cast’s star power. Case in point, the film only made £47,000 on a £1 million budget. Films like Scream weren’t successful because they had glitzy stars, it was successful because it had a great story, great acting, and was scary. Throwing some credits covered in blood at the screen does not make your movie scary.

James Haves