We’re here to talk about When Evil Lurks, the sixth film directed by Damian Ralugna, which just premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. It is being released courtesy of IFC Films and Shutter on October 6th, 2023. I don’t know any of the other works by this Director, but his last title, Satanic, Hispanics, sounded interesting.
“When Evil Lurks” follows Two brothers who discover a chopped body close to their land, so they gather with the villagers to look into it. They find that the strange events in their community are the result of an evil spirit that has taken home a local man whose mother is just waiting for a proper ritual to get rid of her son’s body.
The two brother takes it upon themselves to get rid of the body and the evil spirit, but they wail, and the spirit or the virus spreads through the community. And the rest is what we get to see in the movie.
Here is When Evil Lurks Ending Explained:
When Evil Lurks Movie Explained
“When Evil Lurks”‘s story focuses on two brothers, Pedro and Jimy. So they’re in Argentina in this farming community town. It’s modern times; they’re out there, and they find a dead body cut in half. The body appears to have been severed in half, not by an animal but by something crazy.
They see that this body has the ID of this woman they know. So they go find her, and she’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s the guy who was supposed to come to kill my son.” So the son is this big, bloated mess.
Bloated like he is infected with pus, and he’s been like that for a year lying in this bed, and the mother believes that he is possessed by a demon. So, the body has to be disposed of in a very particular way, which is why they didn’t call the authorities.
So this person who we see was cut in half is called a “Cleaner.” But of course, he didn’t make it to take care of this lady’s son. So the two brothers decide to do it with another man.
The Virus Is Spreading
They start transporting the body in the bed of a pickup truck. Once they get to their destination, they see the body fall off the truck, so they kind of panic. But they see that this (whatever it is) demon zombie virus is spreading.
So Pedro goes to his ex-wife’s house because he wants to take her and their children to safety. But chaos ensues because the dog becomes infected, which then causes the little girl to get infected.
Now, he and his family are on the run, and they end up at Pedro’s Momma’s house. Then they end up finding this lady who knows a little bit about this stuff. And she says, “Oh, you have to find the original,” which was that big, bloated mess we saw in the beginning.
When Evil Lurks Ending Explained
Pedro and his family go into town and find this thing, but we see that a bunch of kids are guarding it. It’s very much like the Village of the dams. And they are not successful in killing the source demon.
So we see Pedro back at home with his one son, who is autistic and he’s nonverbal. Initially, someone says that because of an autistic kid’s mental state, he cannot be infected. But at the very end, we see that he has been infected, and it looks like he ate someone. And this is where “When Evil Lurks” movie ends.
The thing about the autistic kid is that the demon gets trapped in the autistic person’s mind. It was because the demons couldn’t figure out an autistic brain. But the demon then adapts and eventually figures it out, so When Evil Lurke Ending means that there’s no hope and this virus is just going to adapt and spread.
When Evil Lurks In Review
I felt like When Evil Lurks should have been a comedy. The way it’s shot and the way everyone’s acting well. The women are all over the top Hysterical. They were screaming in ways that added to the chaotic tone and the stress, but it made everybody seem kind of dumb. It’s laughable, but there are no jokes, and it’s not supposed to be funny.
I think Pedro makes a lot of really dumb choices that kind of rob the film of any anxiety. Because right away, you’re like, “Oh, I really don’t care what happens to him. Also, the title of the movie When Evil Lurks reminded me of the poem “She Lurks in Beauty Like Tonight.”
In one scene, we hear an alarm going off, and one lady is like, “Oh, they activated the protocol,” and I’m like, “The Demon protocol?”. That would have been a better title for this movie because that that seemed to come out of left field. I had a hard time orienting myself with what exactly was happening. Is it a demon zombie attack, or is it just a zombie attack? And why are animals and children more prone to be the demon’s candy?
The Seven Rules
In this movie, the community seems to be very knowledgeable about demons and what demons do. They even have a protocol, which I find funny because when it actually goes down, it seems like no one knows what to do. And there’s even this complicated list of seven rules that they keep kind of referencing, and that all seems kind of dumb.
The seven rules things seem silly because I thought that that should have been introduced much earlier in the film, but we don’t get it till the 2/3 point or later.
And then these rules are not even given to us in a lot, and they’re kind of like rattled off randomly. Some of the rules were “Don’t go near electricity, “Don’t be afraid to die,” and “Don’t say their names”. And I don’t even remember some other ones, and they’re not even memorable.
The rules are unclear to me about this movie. For a film that has seven specific rules about how people deal with the demons, we don’t know what’s going on with the demons.
The Goat Scene
They’re afraid to kill the original, like the bloated guy, because he believes that then that demon will be passed on to his unborn child.
There’s a scene where that character’s wife goes home, and she’s freaked out because they have goats. And that was actually a pretty gruesome scene because she becomes hysterical about this goat. Then the other 40 goats run away, and this one goat, which I always associate with the devil, is staring at them.
So the husband goes to kill the goat, and she’s like, “No, you can’t do that.” And the husband shoots the goat, so we see the goat’s head. And the wife who we saw grabbed an axe, she stabbed her husband in the head with the axe and killed him and then killed herself by stabbing herself with the axe, and that was pretty gruesome. As is the dog that becomes infected by Pedro’s clothes.
More Of A Comedy Than A Horror
I thought the goat scene played out more like it should have had a laugh track to it. So the dog becomes affected at the ex-wife’s house, and that dog attacks a little girl, and it’s grabbing this girl like a rag doll, shaking her, and dragging her outside, and that felt comical. It felt comical because we see that little girl, and she looks fine afterward, and there’s not a scratch on her.
Then, when the big bloated man falls out of the pickup truck, I feel like that should have been funny. He looked like that fat vampire from the first Blade movie. He also looked like the guy from the new John Wick movie, the fat guy in Berlin.
It does feel cheap, which I think is partially why I would have leaned in for it to be more of a comedy movie. I keep saying I want it to be a comedy, even though it’s not what they were doing. But I think the production value lends itself to that. And the way a lot of the acting lends itself to that.
The green screen work when they’re in the pickup truck is laughable. So then, to me, it’s like, I would have abandoned any sense or any hope of making us a serious horror flick and just go the comedy route, especially because the story itself is kind of familiar. I would give When Evil Lurks Movie 1 and 1/2 out of five stars.
