#666 – The Devil Conspiracy (2022)

Film review #666

Director: Nathan Frankowski

The Devil Conspiracy is a 2022 sci-fi film. Essentially, the plot concerns the battle between Michael and Lucifer, and a present-day cult seeking to revive Lucifer, leading Michael to take possession of a priest’s body to stop them. Sounds like a good old-fashioned religious epic right? The film starts off with an epic battle between Michael and Lucifer, ending with Lucifer being chained up in Hell. I think that’s what happened anyway, because it’s almost impossible to work out what happens amidst the extremely poor lighting that obviously hides the lack of scenery and the poor CG. Cutting away from this to the present day, we see a woman named Laura visiting her friend father Marconi at the Shroud of Turin on display. Meanwhile, a biotech firm has been successfully able to clone geniuses from history from their DNA, and auctioning the clones off to wealthy buyers, as demonstrated in a sequence in the Sistine Chapel where a child clone of Stradivari gives a violin performance. It’s very much Jurassic Park with geniuses instead of velociraptors, and it’s a premise that is at least interesting and has potential. However, it never gets mentioned again, as the biotech firm is secretly a Lucifer worshipping cult that wants to get the Shroud of Turin for themselves to get Jesus’s DNA, and recreate him as a vessel for Lucifer or something. They kidnap Laura to impregnate her or possess her with Lucifer…or both, it’s not really to clear, as she is imprisoned in the cult’s secret headquarters to give birth to the child, meanwhile Michael possesses the body of father Marconi, after he is killed during the theft of the Shroud, as he tries to find Laura and the child.

There’s obviously a lot of interesting elements that are at play here in the film, between religious epics and sci-fi cloning. Unfortunately when the film settles down, it mostly just revolves around Laura stuck in this barren facility occasionally trying to escape through clinical corridors, and Michael being imprisoned in Hell, and also trying to escape; although it’s quite difficult to tell again because of the severe lack of lighting. The core of the movie then just becomes a dull run-around with no real thrills, action or epic battles befitting the subject matter. The acting is less than stellar, the characters are fairly dull, and it drags on for nearly two hours just waiting for Laura to give birth. The worst aspect of the film is probably the lighting, particularly in the sequences in Hell, where you barely see anything that is going on, as mentioned earlier, to obviously obscure the lack of scenery detail and the bad special effects. These scenes are almost impossible to parse and work out just where they are set or what is going on. There’s obviously some thought gone into the colour of what little lighting there is to represent different characters, but it’s nowhere near enough. I can’t really find much positive to say about this film: it has some interesting concepts which it lays out in the outset, then just throws them all away to bring the film to a standstill for the remainder. It is, overall, a dull watch that fails to justify it’s runtime.