The devil may have all the best tunes, but he’s none too fussy about his scripts. The Vatican Tapes is a murky stew of satanic shenanigans that starts with the revelation that the Holy See has a secret archive documenting diabolic visitations. Its prime case history involves a young Los Angeles woman named Angela, who shows worrying symptoms of housing an evil presence – foul temper, a tendency to behave erratically in taxis and an ability to make hapless policemen do horrible things with lightbulbs. Before long, a specialist cardinal arrives from Vatican City, armed with holy water and the now-mandatory camcorders: he’s played by the glumly intoning Peter Andersson, a sort of pseudo Max von Sydow.
Not “found-footage horror” as such, the film nevertheless uses surveillance-style imagery whenever expedient and suggests that the Vatican enjoys instant access to the confidential CCTV footage of American hospitals and mental health institutions, something Edward Snowden failed to warn us about.
Directed by Mark Neveldine, half of the Neveldine-Taylor duo behind the Crank movies, The Vatican Tapes is distinguished by an almost heroic lack of humour. It offers a milder take on the scares that once thrilled America; instead of spewing pea soup by the gallon, as Linda Blair did in The Exorcist, Angela just neatly coughs up three eggs (“Where did you get these?” asks the cardinal, about as startled as if she’d just recreated a classic Paul Daniels trick). The film’s one asset is a poised and sometimes genuinely creepy performance by Olivia Taylor Dudley as the latest unwitting squeeze of Lucifer; she’s even persuasive when rasping threats in, seemingly, the language of hell itself (with English subtitles!). Otherwise, it’s a routine regurgitation of demonology’s familiar myths and legends: needless to say, possession is nine tenths of the lore.
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