Sick Product of a Sick System

best movie i've ever seen.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

James (Simon Phillips) is a detective investigating the strange deaths of a "you lie you die" serial killer. The killer uses a lie detector as a trigger mechanism to kill its victims. The killings start to center around James who is released from the case. Determined to still solve the crimes, James flies to NY to see a crime profiler who happen to be an old girlfriend (Juliette Bennett). His pregnant wife (Lucy Clements) doesn't want him to go.The opening scene made me chuckle. The killer had a Saw-like attitude and feel. This is a crime/thriller with a touch of horror. Film includes your basic twist, nothing fancy, and an ending I might have done differently.Good rental.F-bomb. No sex or nudity.

Paul Tanter hasn't got a great CV. In fact it reads like a list of crimes against British Cinema.So it pains me to say that Shame The Devil isn't truly terrible. Its ideas aren't original, but to condemn it as Saw-lite is unfair. The influence of Saw and Seven is clear, not that there's anything wrong with that. I'd be surprised if anyone could point me towards an original serial killer movie made in the last 10 years. There are many ridiculous moments. A favourite was when a character hands over a note he has received from the killer - 'I think he could be sending us a message.' Another was when the cop from London is in the presumably yet-to-have-internet-access city of New York, and he phones his partner in London to ask him to google something for him. Then there's the pointless Transatlantic commuting.And the end. Because my fast forward doesn't work, I had to watch 40 minutes again to find out who the hell Victor was!Yes, it wasn't original, I laughed in the wrong places and the end made me want to kick the cat. But it kept me watching, and I didn't look once to see how long was left. I'd have gone 5 if it hadn't been for the lazy way the mystery was wrapped up.

I usually enjoy British films, they usually are interesting, clever, witty and well written, 'shame the devil' has none of these attributes. It is classed as horror, sorry I have experienced more horror opening the cupboard and discovering we are getting low on coffee, at one point my wife asked in all sincerity "is it meant to be a comedy?" With most films you have to suspend a bit of logic but with this you need a lobotomy to skip the massive holes in the plot. Why after 7 years does she decide to get back with the most boring man in the world. Who is Victor? Who killed the taxi driver? she was with James and Victor was in London. A British policeman travels across to New York, obtains an illegal gun, breaks in to someone's house, shoots him dead and the New York police do not take him into custody? Lie detectors do not operate in this manner. etc The term wooden is over used but Simon Phillips makes Keanu Reeves look like Orson Welles, he must have been taking direction and being told "look bored senseless in every scene" the dialogue is weird everyone seems to go from 1 to 10 and missing the steps in between. Then we have the continuous flash backs for no apparent reason, then the overused camera flashgun effect. At the end of the film if he had not jumped from the wall there would have been a queue of viewers to help him bring an end to this abysmal offering.

If you claim to be even just a mild fan of the horror genre then you probably know about the 'Saw' films by now. From the opening scene in 'Shame the Devil' you'll probably be thinking, 'Oh, this is a Saw rip-off.' And you'd be right. Although, maybe Shame the Devil isn't anything like Saw at all, because the Saw franchise was well-done and successful whereas Shame the Devil is total rubbish.Sorry to be blunt, but there isn't much going for this film. It's a British version of Saw, only nowhere near as good on any level.Yes, it's a horror film and anyone who's ever watched one probably isn't expecting amazing performances from the characters. However, the actors here take bad acting to new levels. In fact, sometimes the performances are so bad that you could be excused for thinking that they're a bunch of students, playing at being professionals.However, maybe I'm being a little unfair on the actors. They really don't get much to work with. Every line they're forced to speak is filled with clichés and sounds like it's been copied and pasted from one generic cop movie or another. With acting and dialogue like this it makes it impossible to care for any of the characters as they sort of bumble about, trying to catch a killer who's hell-bent on making his victims confess to their darkest secrets or murdering them if they lie.Simple verdict: don't bother. There's absolutely nothing positive about this film at all (with the possible exception of the quite breath-taking establishing shots of London, which I found quite nice!).http://thewrongtreemoviereviews.blogspot.co.uk/