The Devil Made Me Do It
Hello wonderful people,
I have decided to give Dead Files another chance and review the second episode. It is called “The Devil Made Me Do It” and nobody ever says this phrase at any point in time in the episode.
This episode takes place in Asbury Park, New Jersey at the Plan B restaurant owned by a guy named Jeffery. As usual Matt, Steve and Amy fill their roles as investigator, psychic and silent camera guy. Speaking of Matt I should probably mention that he is apparently known as the silent camera guy, which is why he hardly interacts with Amy.
“… [Asbury Park] was devastated by the economy and riddled with crime…” Steve DiSchavi.
Has anyone else noticed that (possibly stereotypical) montages of not so good places or neighborhoods that just happen to have graffiti “crime” is associated with it? I mean I know it is wrong to spray paint public property but there are other things that show a place is in financial troubles. Could you imagine if people put graffiti on their own houses when they were devastated by the economy, it’s just a symbol of some idiots wanting to deface public property not the community as a whole…
Before the ranting and raving ensues, here’s the definition of a demon:
1. An evil supernatural being; a devil.
2. A persistently tormenting person, force, or passion
Demons also are not nor where they ever alive or human. They can make themselves appear human to fool a person and lure them into demonic possession/oppression but they are not (in the paranormal sense) human. The “human form” of a demon is evil people who has no soul, conscience, and are horrible people who do horrible things. Keep those two things in mind throughout the review, it’s important…
The issue of episode two, “the devil made me do it” is that Jeffery (the owner) has had many experiences that he can’t explain and his staff is being scared out of their minds by ‘unseen’ forces. I doubt they’re unseen because there have been claims of apparitions by the staff. The staff complaints are they don’t want to work late, go in the basement, and the biggest complaint (for a restaurant owner) they don’t want to work in the kitchen because of the activity going on there. Jeffery brought the restaurant “a few years back” according to Steve, and when your staff is telling you something is wrong with the kitchen and your business is feeding people you really do have a problem, a really big problem… Oh look here’s Amy’s part of the episode…
Amy mentions how she feels some pain from spirits before she’s at the location, I wish she’d specified the location of the spirits because it’s not like she was in one place she was driving down a street. I’ve heard that spirits can sense when people who are still living are sensitive, well some of them can, and what if there was an incident near that one street she was driving down that involved a beating or being hit in the head that was proven to be a murder but no one was ever charged with it and the case grows cold. The spirit knows this and they reach out to Amy briefly showing her the pain it felt before death then let go because she was traveling and it couldn’t keep up. That’s always a possibility then again I could be completely wrong for all I know communication with the dead might not even work that way when you’re a physical psychic medium.
I think I need to keep track of how long it takes for Amy to mention something ‘bad’ or ‘negative’ happened. In this episode we got three minutes and fifty seconds into it before she said anything and the one thing I am excluding is the intro to the show. The part that shows all those clips spliced from other times and put into a few seconds to hype up the episode in the beginning, that part doesn’t count because that isn’t the original part they were mentioned in. The introductions have to be done first and then I shall start counting how quickly she throws that word out to the world.
As usual with her walkthrough (that’s a bad thing to say when you’re two episodes in) she’s cryptic and gives little insight to anything of importance. This makes me want to kick Matt in the shins for just standing there like an idiot and not engaging her in conversation to make sense of what she’s getting. She states how scared she is of this ‘negative’ energy, how it hates women, and it isn’t a good energy at all. She’s struggling to deal with it and he just stands there… I wonder how long they have worked together because the few times Matt has said something she just ignores him and keeps walking. So maybe he is silent because she acts like he isn’t even there on the walk through and he knows now that it won’t change because they’re on television. I feel bad for him (only slightly) if this is the case. Being ignored or given the cold shoulder is hurtful and can emotionally kill a person for a long time. If this is not the case then he needs to assert himself more and sound like he actually wants an answer. It’s the only way she’ll stop walking all over him when he just throws in his one comment on what she is saying.
A perfect opportunity for him to enact this bravery would have been how she’s ranting about how “it hates women” and when she says she normally doesn’t have any trouble when dark spirits are around but the one in the basement seemed to make her feel so scared she wanted to throw up. He could have said, “Ask it why it doesn’t like women” or “are you sure about that previous statement because you seem to be letting this thing get to you. I am having a hard time believing your statement of courage when you’re falling apart in the face of whatever this thing is that’s haunting the basement.” I know that sounds mean but the entire time I’m watching this episode I was thinking to myself suck it up and get your ass down in the basement. You show that thing who is boss and that it can no longer pick on the living because you will report it to the owner and be getting rid of it in a few days.
Or if you don’t want to do that, just tell it to back off, go away, or something. You’re not supposed to melt to the ground in a puddle of fear in the face of ‘demonic’ entities, that’s what they want and it feeds them. You have to not be scared and if you are, you don’t sit there and start nearly crying about it. As hard as it may be you swallow your fear and you face it. It can’t feed off of positive energy it feeds off the weak and vulnerable people who have a lot of crap going on in their life. Amy is different because she is sensitive so it is going to be drawn to her no matter how happy she is but in prepping herself for the basement, she just broke down. She probably fed the thing at that moment in time more than anything else. I’m surprised it didn’t attach to her and follow her home.
By the way, I quote ‘demonic’ because she can’t get her stories straight, the way she explains things makes it sound like there’s all one spirit that travels from the dining hall to the basement meanwhile there’s more negativity in the basement than in the dining hall as well as another spirit (the one that was in pain and showing her the pain earlier in the car ride) and it can’t be demonic if they were a living spirit at any point in time. She constantly interchanges the negative and demonic like they mean the same and they are not the same thing. Far from the same thing but the two traits often accompany each other. Negativity happens in demonic haunts it also could be a really pissed off spirit or a poltergeist. Negativity does not always mean demonic and it annoys me she throws the words together like they deserve to be clumped in the same sentence. Real Paranormal researchers would keep all options open you wouldn’t go into a place with an angry spirit saying they’re a demon because you’re then performing the wrong means of removal and possibly damning the spirit to hell. I don’t know the technicalities of religion and I do not care to spend weeks researching them. All I know is you would try to catch a mouse with a skunk trap so why try to remove an angry spirit like you’d remove a demon.
Ending my rant on Amy and Matt’s walk through it’s time to head over to Steve and his interview sessions which begins a new rant. How Steve looks like he doesn’t believe the people he talks to and his facial expressions show it. He looks at them like they are making it all up, they’re insane, or they somehow are exaggerating it. That has to be uncomfortable for the clients to sit down and talk to the person supposed to help you about whatever is nearly destroying business because you can only put people through so much fear until they either snap and flat up go crazy and/or quit, or take the better option and confront their fears. They’ve been faced with this for two years and this one guy they mention seems to be on the edge but of course they’re going to hint around at it and mention more bad things happening… we’re going back to Amy just as quick as we left her and Matt for Steve’s interview sessions.
Ten minutes and twenty eight seconds into the show, she hints around about something demonic and something bad happening in the basement. This is where she attempts to go ‘into detail’ about what the fear she is feeling is like to the ‘audience’ and it just makes her look like a coward. I understand not everyone wants to go headstrong into a possibly demonic case, but she just was like ‘oh no I don’t like this I don’t want to go down there and I’m going to stall for as long as I possibly can by talking about how sick I feel until I eventually force myself to walk down the stairs. I’m also going to not make any sense by talking about some magical void of nonexistent energy yet there’s a demon down here.’
For the promising title of “the devil made me do it” it is really disappointing and we’re only ten minutes in and we also get a random disclaimer saying that there’s nothing in the show that could hold up in a court of law. We don’t get told why we have a random warning that the ‘evidence’ obtained in the case will not be admissible, it just is said and then forgotten about. What do they think someone involved will call the cops and say “this show has evidence of so and so committing [insert crime here] and you should go arrest said person because the show said they did it!” No one would do this and if they did or if they believed it would help, they’re stupid, it’s a paranormal reality show, key words there are ‘reality’ and ‘show’ admitting that’s where you got your information from will get you laughed at and no one will take you seriously ever again.
Nothing eventful happens that I care to comment on with Steve’s interview session so it’s back to Amy and Matt and that was painfully annoying and anti-climactic so here’s the walk through in a nutshell. At eleven minutes and thirty one seconds into the show Amy mentions some bad stuff but hardly explains it, there’s also an absence of energy but there is a negative entity down there. The negative entity laughs and growls at her then proceeds to touch her and she said it’s possibly not human. All the while Matt doesn’t react to anything going on around him even though if there was a demonic entity everyone should be feeling the effects it has on the atmosphere of the room. One last thing I have to applaud her descriptive skills ‘a very dark, darkness’ Amy you really need to go to Bobby Mackey’s Music World in Wilder, Kentucky and look at the basement there. You’d probably piss your pants. Now it’s Steve’s turn to be summarized with his epic lavender shirt.
You’d think since they’ve mentioned Benny so much and that they should talk to him about the true terror of the paranormal activity. They should spend a long time talking to him and getting a lot of details as much as he willing to give them that is, and look in to see what role he plays in the haunting. Nope we do none of that, instead we show a total of five minutes on Benny and then we move on to the checking into the history of the building. By the way Jeff you don’t just buy a building and just open up shop, you check the history always. Seriously you don’t know who owned it and what they did before you got there. You should have known to do some kind of search; Google is a very magical website or if not Google, go to the library they should have archives in the computer which the librarian can look through for you. How lazy and irresponsible are you that you can’t take five minutes out of your life to check into the building you’re buying for your restaurant? Obviously you have to be really lazy because Steve found the murder in five simple minutes.
Enough with Steve for a moment there’s another mention of something evil at eleven minutes and fifty seven seconds it is after this is mentioned that Steve drops the bombshell that Jeff never checked the history, so I am skipping a head of myself but it is okay it’s not like the show cares about continuity so why should I care? Oh because reviewing something out of order would be a mess… case in point the first episode.
The plot boils down to Ray, a 72 year old man who owned an antique shop named Ray and his employee of a few days Moses, who was charged with the murder of Ray. What happened was they were in the basement and Moses was doing some construction work or something, and Ray supposedly grabbed Moses’s butt. Moses didn’t like that so he felt it necessary to whack him upside the head with the hammer he was holding. Not once, but three times. The way the story is told though you can’t tell whether to feel bad for Ray or for Moses. I know I was on the fence until I found out the whole story but before all that happens you think Moses is going to claim that the devil made him constantly smash the poor guy’s head in, but no he doesn’t do that, and there’s no devil so how the possible demonic entity got there in the first place is a mystery. I’m not even calling it a demonic entity I’m going to call it a poltergeist because that’s what it is. She doesn’t know the difference between the two, yes both are inhuman but they are not one in the same.
I also love how Steve looked shocked during the reveal about Moses when he got no detail on the guy that was aired to the audience. He could have gotten all the information in the world but a small fraction of it is actually shown on air. It’s kind of annoying as well as they don’t explain who the woman hater is and what that fact has anything to do with Moses or Ray. They just leave that fact up in the air but it was one of the first things Amy said when she walked into the dining area. Moses sure wasn’t a women hater; he had a girlfriend at the time who he obviously didn’t hate because she would have acted differently if he abused her. Gay people don’t hate women they just don’t find them sexually attractive and that leaves the poltergeist… so I guess it doesn’t like women…
Also why are they giving options to Jeff when they gave nothing to Elvis in the first episode? That’s not fair to him, they just gave him the evidence they found and left the portal open. For this guy they offer a cleansing which apparently works. Cleansings don’t normally help get rid of true demonic entities it pisses them off and the activity gets worse. It worked for Jeff which is another sign this isn’t a demon, it’s either something from possibly a Native American thing because that can be mistaken as a demonic haunt or it’s just something negative from a bad past that somehow invited a poltergeist because the show says so…
I am Pugsly and I have no idea why I continue to review this stupid show…
