‘Demonic’ Review: Neill Blomkamp Returns with a Dull but Visually Inventive Supernatural Horror Movie

Technology has always been the dominant creative force behind the films of Neill Blomkamp, a former special effects artist whose “what if Apartheid, but aliens?” metaphor “District 9” earned him a Best Picture nomination before he was 30, whose dopey Matt Damon vehicle “Elysium” took class warfare to intergalactic levels, and whose Twitter-famous “Chappie” — perhaps the best movie ever made about a psychotically obnoxious police robot being captured and reprogrammed by the South African rap group Die Antwoord — forever redefined people’s ability to identify Chappie.And yet, despite those increasingly ridiculous examples, Blomkamp’s impetus to let digital tools drive his storytelling has never been more transparent or contrived than it is in his Doa new horror film “Demonic,” which leans on three sequences created with volumetric capture (described by Blomkamp as a kind of three-dimensional video system through which the actors are simultaneously recorded with 260 cameras and then

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