A clear rip-off of Ben Wheatley's KILL LIST, THE DEVIL'S BUSINESS is a hopeless travesty of a film. Shot almost entirely in the dark with mainly just two actors on the screen, it sees a couple of hit-man - a seasoned professional and his rookie apprentice - visiting a house to carry out a hit. Once there they find the place deserted so they sit round for about an hour of screen time, waiting for him to show up.The story is extraordinarily low budget so this needed a fantastic script to make up for it. Sadly there isn't one. The acting is hopeless, particularly on the part of the inexperienced younger guy, but it's the dialogue that crushes the life from this one. There's a ten minute monologue which is one of the dullest ever and has no real connection to the central story, as tenuous as that is. It appears somebody researched the life of Aleister Crowley and decided to do a modern-day version of the tale but the effort is entirely unsuccessful. Indeed THE DEVIL'S BUSINESS is the worst horror film I've seen in a long time, and that comes from somebody frequently exposed to the worst late-night excesses of The Horror Channel.

I can't think of another instance where I've felt the need to comment on a film that wasn't especially good, or especially bad. I think it might be because this film is nearly brilliant.--- THE SPOILER ---It's the end that lets it down. I don't mean the homunculus. I do like a homunculus. I mean how it was done. I can't say there was anything wrong with any of the elements, and I think the bit where the dead bloke leads the homunculus away like a child could have and should have worked really well. Maybe just poor execution of a good idea.--- END SPOILER --- A lot of the film was really nicely acted and it did a great job of building tension. Billy Clark's monologue about the dancer at the club was excellent. He really stole the show for me. I suppose a bloke from Belfast his age working as a hit man for a mainland gangster is nicely plausible now that the local hooding industry has dried up. Even so I thought he really carried some real menace, and it's just nice to see a fellow Belfastard in a central role once in a while.It's also nice to see another film about the occult. It was all the rage back in the 80s but it's really fallen out of favour in the last decade or two. The very mighty House of the Devil seems to have revived it a little, and I'm very much in favour. The Devil's Rock, The Devil's Business – Bring back films with 'The Devil' in the title! Overall I think this film deserves a six for a brilliant first fifty minutes.

Even though it's just over an hour long, this movie is very taut and tense for the majority of it's duration.Two hit men, on a new boy and one a veteran, are waiting for the eponymous Kist, who for some reason needs to be killed. He is at the opera and should be home after midnight.after a few exchanges, the hit men check the area, and find some very disturbing things in the garage, that could indicate some kind of devil worship is going on.After they find the body of a child, they realise all is not well.Kist arrives home and is killed. On their way out of the house, one realises that he has left his watch, on entering the house, Kists body has gone...Yes, the movie is so much like Kill List, that you know that something will change the whole of narrative and the genre before the final act, but, considering the lack of sets and the tight budget, it's very surreal and atmospheric.This is partly thanks to some use of wonderful lighting, and a fantastic monologue by Pinner about Eddie, and his cheating wife.The trouble is that the film gets a little too bonkers for it's own good come the end. I would accept the fact that Kist could be resurrected due to Paganism, but did you really have to go all 'Don't Look Now' at the end.Fans of kill list should see this, for the most part, it's excellent.

The Devil's Business just came across as an extremely low budget made-for-TV movie. It was heavily dependent on the conversation between just 2 people for the majority of the movie duration. In order to carry that sort of setup off you're going to need some top quality acting and while the acting was occasionally decent in this movie, it was also sometimes below average.Both Billy Clarke and Jonathan Hansler gave decent performances for the most part but Jack Gordon couldn't really match them for most of his on-screen time, although there was one scene where he demonstrated his true capability and that just about saved his credibility. Perhaps the scripting for his character was part of the problem. All the actors showed promise but they really needed more time and more takes to film the scenes perfectly. I assume either the budget didn't allow them to do this, or the director didn't spot the potential for improvement.The writing overall was good and could even be considered the stand-out feature, it's just a shame that the budget couldn't be stretched considerably to make this into a real film and bring out the writing with cut-scenes and great cinematography. Instead, nearly all the action takes place in a darkly-lit small house somewhere in England. As a result, the visual imagery is just dull and boring for most of the movie and it gets tiresome rather quickly.The production value was just a notch above the sort of movie a student might make at college or university, it was just so low that it was almost filmed like an episode of some British television show from the 80's, just sadly not with the same sort of entertainment value.All the actors had some passion to their work, the writing was decent, the direction, while flawed, showed promise. But as a complete package, a fairly terrible movie that I just can't recommend. Maybe with a bigger budget it could have been a totally different story..