Shannyn Sossamon is the Devil: “Devour”

I realize that the Shannyn Sossamon-hate runs wide and deep amongst my readers. Tenfeet, Qui, and even the work-wife harbor a disdain for her that borders on the unhealthy. While I’m sure there’s a potential psych dissertation to be mined here, I’m going to sidestep that issue for right now and crank out this quickie review for Devour. Which, uh, might have Sossamon in it somewhere. Maybe in a crowd scene. I didn’t really notice.

Okay, so Devour… what’s it about? Well, curiously enough it’s not about devouring anything. No cannibals, man-eating aardvarks, not even a giant squid to be found. Instead it’s about Satanism. The movie comes down anti-Satanism, which is a pretty safe side of the fence to be on. Jake Gray (played by an inexpressive slab of ground chuck named Jensen Ackles) is a good-son college senior. How good a boy is he? He studies hard, works part-time at a computer-repair store (which curiously never has any customers), visits his paraplegic mother in her assisted-care facility, and keeps his borderline-psychotic best friend from murdering people. He also wears a lot of denim, sometimes two or three layers of it on his upper-body alone. Perhaps this is to establish his character as a salt-of-the earth type. Perhaps the wardrobe department just really sucked.

Anyway, for his 21^st birthday, Jake’s psychotic best friend Conrad (Teach Grant) and his, er, the best description would be “fuck-buddy,” Dakota (an appropriately-trampy Dominique Swain and sporting a fair amount of denim herself) decide to have some fun by playing an online game called “The Pathway.” The idea is, you punch in your phone number and some mysterious guy calls you and tells you to do stuff. Apparently this sounds like fun to them. Things start going awry pretty much from jump street. Jake has nightmarish premonitions about murder and self-mutilation, he encounters some kind of demonic beast in his basement, and he meets cute with Shannyn Sossamon (I would count that last one as a highlight of my day, but I’m playing to my audience here). Sossamon is an amateur occultist and physical therapist and she and Jake get to canoodling almost immediately. Jake seems happy with this, but it’s hard to tell.

So then Jake’s friends start murdering people and disfiguring themselves at the behest of the mysterious “Pathway” caller (who must be really persuasive). Jake investigates Pathway and stumbles onto a cult of Satanists, which just so happens to include his parents. Oh, but in a big twisteroo he finds that his parents are actually his adoptive parents. His real mother is Satan, who has taken the form of Sossamon (he learns this after he’s totally macked on her…ew). And the movie ends with Jake accepting that he is literally the spawn of Satan. Oh, and being frog-marched to jail, because mom/lover Satan framed him for the murder of his adoptive parents. Satan’s sort of a bitch.

Devour has virtually nothing to recommend if you’re one of the legion of people who hate Shannyn Sossamon. The performances are uniformly atrocious, and director David Winkler has no discernable directing style—you’re average Gilette razor commercial has more visual style than this film.The screenplay, however, delivers some real howlers. To wit:

“Imagine if Hitler had the Internet”

“Are you okay?” [Jake asks a woman he finds in the woods, naked, bound, gagged, and bruised—why would would he think she wasn’t okay?]

“You don’t cross people who give up their souls.”

“What are we to make of this Dionysian offering?” “Mimosas.”

“What a shame. I thought you were trying to get in my pants.” “It is my birthday.”

“I didn’t want the devil to be a woman!”

“My laptop just stopped working.” “They do that.”

“They look up to you, Jake, but they’re still caught in the rain.” “What does that mean?” “Don’t get wet.”

“Valerie Gaines…senior prom…behind the gym. You guys thought we were powdering our noses. Her nose was up my skirt.”

“God, I’m so drunk…I need another drink.”

“I know what the voices in your head really tell you to do.”

“Jake saved my life.” “It was just a circuit board.”

“I don’t know whether to cry or scream.”

“Are you sure you want company tonight?” “No, but I like being with you.”

“My parents named me for where I was conceived.”

“When we started, The Pathway was a just a game that had the strange ability to know what we were thinking.”

“So when did you stop worshipping Satan?”

“There’s more pussy at a black mass than there is at a Metallica concert.”

“Satan rewards you for killing a dog?”

“I’ve seen this man. In my head.”

“You stared the devil directly in the face and you never looked away. And when you finally did, we knew that we found you.”

“Noooooooo!”

So there you go. Devour. Notable for nothing except the fact that Shannyn Sossamon is Satan (which appears to be the general consensus anyway), and a dopey title. Personally, I would have preferred a couple of man-eating aardvarks to just about everything else in the film. Now if someone would make a film in which Shannyn Sossamon commands a herd of man-eating aardvarks, I’d be all over that.