Devil's Backbone, Texas
Devil's Backbone, Texas
| 31 March 2015 (USA)
Devil's Backbone, Texas Trailers

In January, 1996 Unsolved Mysteries featured a story on landowner Bert Wall's 'real-life' interactions with the spirits that roamed the Devil's Backbone. Nearly twenty years later, Wall passed away...leaving behind only fragmented tales of an inexplicable terror to those that knew him best.

Reviews
Memorergi good film but with many flaws
Lightdeossk Captivating movie !
CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.
StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.
FlashCallahan In January 1996, Robert Stack and Unsolved Mysteries featured a story on landowner Bert Wall's interactions with the spirits that roamed the Devil's Backbone. The tale goes that he was quite a bizarre person, and spent a lot of time in solitude.Nearly twenty years later, Wall passed away, leaving behind tales of an inexplicable terror to those that knew him best.So his estranged son decides to,do,the right thing after seeing the documentary, and go and seek the truth about his father, and lay him to rest in a ceremony....It's another found footage movie that starts off particularly well, and very authentic. The makers go down the Blair Witch route of interviewing townsfolk. Some maybe real, some may not be, but what they are definitely full of boring stories, and the camera focuses on the for too long.What worked with Blair.... was the interviews were extremely short, short enough for you not to think about the myths, short enough to make you uneasy.These just linger, and by the time they reach the place they are supposed to be going to, the films nearly over, and you couldn't care less about them.So the son goes about bonkers, there is a phantom car, and just before you can say Scooby Doo!, its all over after a silly attempt and and really misjudged jump scare.It's as if the jump scare was add to prompt the audience to know that the film is over.Believe me, you lost my attention way before the ending.Don't bother...
martoni64 Not many, but I've seen worse. It starts off promising with a son looking for closure after his father's death, bringing a few friends for a simply ceremony. He makes it all into some kind of documentary so this movie is part self documentary (Blair witch project you know) and part real time action. Now, if the parts hinted at in the documentary part of the film actually got acted on in the real time action part - then it would actually, maybe, and quite possibly have been a decent horror story. But no, that doesn't really happen.Either because the actors and director doesn't have necessary talent to pull it through, or because the script is bad, or maybe a combination. Yelling in darkness isn't acting, so that doesn't count towards talent. And, unfortunately, that is most that happens in the real life action part of the film. It simply gets hideously boring.I think it would have been much, much better to concentrate on the documentary, fleshing out the story that way and make a Gothic, Lovecraftian end to it all rather than the poor action it contains. Alas it's much too late for that now ...
powerrose Roger Ebert claimed that Human Centipede was the worst movie ever made, but at least it had a purpose (and plot and acting). No, this is truly, absolutely, the worst movie ever made in the history of all movies.Don't think I take this condemnation lightly. This "movie" should not even be called a film. It is the movie version of muzak, or Kidz Bop. It's a movie that got made that no one thought was good or intended for anyone to see. I truly think that they hoped to sell this to netflix and some really, really low-level channels, like channel 33 in Guatemala at 3:00am.Oh, if only this film were bad. There are movies that are so bad, they become campy or cult films. No, this film is the most mediocre waste of film to ever be produced. This film is like a computer algorithm wrote it, and it's got the formula down exactly, but it just slapped in whatever. Or that the film maker made it really fast, like a college kid with a paper due the next day.It's a bummer, because the base of a good movie is there. I mean, it's about his own father who was on Unsolved Mysteries because his ranch was so haunted! So, even though the beginning is full of this lame guy and his painfully, painfully white privileged, LA friends, for about 20 minutes you have a tiny hope that this thing might be watchable.First third of the movie: I'm mildly interested because of the true family dynamics so even though the central cast sucks, maybe this will come out to be enjoyable.Second third: This isn't much of a spoiler, because this film has seemingly hundreds of things haunting the ranch including: Cherokees, angry ghost of woman raped to death by Cherokees, Nazis, possessed pigs, dead animals, live animals, blurry things, thudding things, scary blurred face ghost children, ghost pickup trucks, aliens?, ghost rocks (not kidding), ghosts down a hole, goat-killing demons, tire-slashing demons (I will grant that they might be the same as the goat-slashing demons), a tiny baby piano, spiders, maybe the Blair Witch (they go in circles a lot and yell about maps), people going crazy, women screaming on cell phones, kids screaming, and so on. So, the second third is sort of a numbing, deep confusion.Last third: Playing Candy Crush and wondering how much worse this can get (the ending. There isn't a student film around with a worse ending.)
Justin Barrow I'm may be a little biased with my review. So, real Texan here. It was an excellent surprise to see Jack Glover's appearance in the movie. I haven't been a fan of bouncing camera Blair Witch Project/Cloverfield style of filming taking over so many new horror movies! I'm glad I gave this one a chance. The manual camera style isn't over the top, and it actually works well with the plot. I think it's time to take a weekend trip to The Devil's Backbone. I know I'll never forget my times with Jack Glover as a child. The fact that he was portraying himself went a long ways with me. I've looked up some of the other stories/events the movie references, and it's obvious there was a lot of research that went into the story.