Herediterrible: DeVour (David Winkler, 2005)

First things first: Yes, I know who the President is. Yes, I know what he’s doing. Yes, I know all of it — the executive order banning federal recognition of trans identity, the executive order banning transition care for minors, the executive order banning safe and non-discriminatory treatment for trans children in schools. 

But there are, as of yet, no executive orders banning trans people from watching movies where Jensen Ackles interacts with the Devil’s vagina, so that’s what I’ve been doing.

I have said, many times, that I find something deeply inspiring about bad horror movies. There comes a certain point, when you're making something like DeVour — maybe when you learn its name is DeVour, because why is it called that? How is that relevant to the plot? Why is the V capitalized? Is it named after John DeVore's sinister French cousin? Why is a movie that is at least nominally about a spooky haunted videogame called “The Pathway” not, at least, called “The Pathway?” Aren't people going to be disappointed when they buy a ticket to DeVour and find out it contains absolutely no devouring?  — when you know that this isn’t going to be the movie anyone wants to be remembered for. 

The cast of DeVour are all actual actors who must, at one point, have longed to be taken seriously. There are real cinematographers and grips and makeup people and costume people showing up every day, right on time, plying their craft. Someone wrote this script, and rewrote it, many times over, until it finally got greenlit. Blood and sweat and tears poured into this thing, countless hours of labor and countless dreams; Jensen Ackles cared so much about DeVour that he got his actual father cast as his character’s father, and there’s a shouted, tearful, heavily Acted discussion about that father’s alcoholism inserted halfway through, as if to say “man, that Jensen Ackles really can act — and there’s his father, being both paid and forced to watch him do it." Jensen Ackles did all that knowing full well that this was a movie where a scary video game would force him to make out with his sexy girlfriend who is later revealed to be his Mom, who is actually also a nine-foot-tall Satan with a gooch, which we see her push a (much smaller and younger) Jensen Ackles out of, on screen, in an unnecessary flashback. 

DeVour loves unnecessary flashbacks, by the way. There’s a scene in which Jensen Ackles’ friend signs him up for the spooky video game, explaining “someone will call you and tell you to do things,” and then, in the next scene, someone calls Jensen Ackles and tells him to do a thing, and this is confusing, apparently, so it’s immediately accompanied by a red-tinged replay of the footage from one hundred and twenty seconds earlier — the footage in which Jensen Ackles’ friend tells him that someone is going to call and tell him to do things — and then we cut back to present-day Jensen Ackles, having successfully remembered his conversation from two minutes ago, nodding, like “yes, this makes sense now. I will do the thing as you request.” 

Jensen Ackles knew that was in the movie. Everyone knew that was in the movie! Everyone knew that the movie they were making was DeVour, which would hit screens with a wet thud in 2005 and never be seen or heard from again. 

Yet every day, all these trained professionals, who could have been anywhere else, doing anything else, showed up to make this movie. They didn’t get the script they wanted, the premise they wanted, the job they wanted, the life they wanted; they didn’t get to make Art, or even decent entertainment; they had no hope of praise, of thanks, of anything but infamy; and yet, in the face of all this, they knuckled down and set out to make DeVour the best damn scary-video-game-makes-Jensen-Ackles-touch-the-Devil’s-cooch-which-is-actually-also-his-mom’s-cooch-because-he’s-secretly-Satan-Junior story the world has ever seen.

Some people tear up when they think about the band on the Titanic playing one last song as the ship went under. I tear up thinking about the cast and crew of the 2005 movie DeVour. It’s just noble, is what it is. It’s a triumph of the human spirit. Even if everything is terrible, and we didn’t get anything we wanted, and nothing is going to work out, we can show up and make this one stupid movie and, honestly? If we all put our backs into it? We can probably make this movie kind of fun. 

DeVour is kind of fun! It’s like you asked a five-year-old to draw Hereditary from memory. The “spooky video game” premise gets dropped immediately, and Jensen Ackles finds out that Satan made the spooky video game (as he makes all video games, children) by seeing a poster with the word “Satan” on it, at which point he goes to his childhood priest, and — despite having a childhood priest, who routinely came over to his home, by which we infer he was raised Catholic — opens the conversation with “what do you think of this Satan guy, Father? Is he real?” 

Satan is an entirely new concept for Jensen Ackles. The priest has to hand Jensen Ackles a book containing various pictures of Satan, to familiarize him with the subject, at which point Jensen Ackles’ eyes widen, like, “so THAT’S the horned and cloven-hoofed figure I’ve been seeing around town! Who knew he had a backstory?” This movie is firmly aimed at people with the IQ and life experience of a Labrador Retriever. That’s what makes it great. It’s a great film.  

I mean, no it’s not, but where else are you going to see Jensen Ackles making out with Shannyn Sossamon directly after learning that she’s his biological mother? Or reacting with horror upon learning that his best friend has killed himself by sticking pencils in his ears? Or having fully clothed sex on an office chair, during which it's not clear that his pants ever actually come down at all? Or being squeezed out of – and subsequently back into! – the Devil’s squanch? Nowhere! Dozens, perhaps hundreds of movies exist in this world, but there’s only one that has all these sights in it, and that’s DeVour. 

There’s a lesson in this for us all. Several of them, actually: One is “don’t play video games,” for the game studios of the Devil are many and profitable. Another is “here’s what Satan looks like,” in case you, like Jensen Ackles, were unfamiliar. The third, however, is that none of us get to pick the work we do in this life. We can end up with tasks we don’t want. We can end up in situations where victory feels impossible. We can end up playing out a shitty script for a shitty director with no possibility of anything other than a shitty end result. 

And if we show up, every day, and do our best, what we come up with will still be pretty entertaining. So yeah: I know — I know — what is happening. I know that it’s awful and terrible and dark and hopeless. But we’re not making Citizen Kane here. We’re just doing the job in front of us. It won’t be good, but we can make it less bad than it could have been. Let’s get to work. 

DeVour is streaming on Tubi. It's also $3.99 to rent on YouTube. I guess, since the time I filed this post, there has also been a fucking coup.