Devil’s Diary (2007)

Warning: I’ll have to spoil some of the film’s middle act twists.

High schoolers Dominique (Alexz Johnson) and Ursula (Magda Apanowicz) are low on the totem pole in the brutal hierarchy of their school, but at least, they have each other – and actually at least a handful of friends, more than most kids in their situation in the movies usually get – to keep the usual combination of jocks and cheerleaders off. Dominique is the one with the better game face, protecting Ursula and herself with gallows humour and an excellent pose of not giving a shit. At the same time she’s hiding most of her own hurts, like a rapey stepfather.

While they are farting around at a graveyard, lightning strikes a grave and uncovers an old book. Ursula feels particularly drawn to the improbable things, and discovers that writing in it as if it were a diary makes her wishes come true. Alas, not all of her wishes, but only those based in hatred and other negative feelings, so very quickly, the nastiest of the jocks and cheerleaders are having increasingly brutal accidents. The more Ursula uses her newfound power, the angrier and nastier she becomes. Once Dominique realizes that Ursula isn’t “just” having a breakdown but is becoming possessed by an evil supernatural power, she does her best to save her friend. Parts of the cheerleading squad also get wind of what is actually going on, and decide to steal the diary.

As it turns out, an evil cheerleader is not a pleasant alternative.

Apparently, this is how Lifetime movies looked in 2007. Given its Lifetime movie status, Farhad Mann’s film has some surprisingly nasty moments – the special effects aren’t any great shakes, but this is not a film afraid showing a teenager dying puking out all of her teeth or another get his face melted off by acid. It’s certainly not tasteful, but I can’t help but respect the film for it.

The staging of the death scenes is generally on the crude and tacky side, but that appears to be the tone the whole film is very consciously going for, be it there or in its emotional moments. Even the way it escalates its plot and the degree of the supernatural threat has a certain tacky superficiality. Typically, you’d find this material handled as the tale of a female friendship under pressure destroyed by a supernatural threat that weaponizes the trauma of one of the friends. Devil’s Diary seems to get bored by this approach early on, and so begins to let the diary wander into cheerleader hands and eventually even draws a secretly Satanist catholic priest out of its hat. Of course, given how one-dimensional the characterization of every single character not named Dominique – she’s got at least two dimensions – here is, staying on the more psychological lane would simply not have played to the film’s strengths.

Having realized that subtlety really isn’t the ballpark it wants to play in, the film kills off Ursula in the middle in a particularly unpleasant way and then goes off to the races of increasingly absurd plot twists, bizarre scenes of a cheerleader who has turned herself dominant towards all men (and doesn’t have the imagination to do the same to women as well), an attempted rape by stepfather, and said secretly Satanist priest. It’s a wonder of tacky, pulpy, absurdity, and really rather a lot of fun, if one is in the right mood.

Mann isn’t exactly a great director, but his blunt, bad music video on a budget, style fits the content of the film rather wonderfully. He also leaves enough space for the young actresses – the male characters don’t have terribly much to do here – to chew the scenery quite enthusiastically. There is so much evil glowering, evil staring and evil catfighting (don’t ask) going on here, you could use it to make two other movies.

And if that doesn’t recommend Devil’s Diary to you, I don’t know what could.