I’ve never seen an episode of the Jersey Shore. The closest I have ever come to knowing much about the show was when Snooki wrestled at WrestleMania. Isn’t that weird? Snooki wrestled at ‘Mania? I can’t even really imagine that that was a thing that happened. And it happened at WrestleMania 27, which was almost fourteen years ago.

Fourteen years! Was it that long ago that Jersey Shore was at the height of its popularity? That’s wild. Time is merciless to us all as we hurtle relentlessly through space, orbiting a ferocious ball of flame that will one day destroy everything we ever knew.

But anyway, no; I’ve never seen Jersey Shore. I know it’s reputation as peak trashy TV, but it could be Shakespeare for all I am aware. I kind of like that most everyone had a code name. “Snooki”. “The Situation”. “JWoww”. Who did they think they were, The Avengers?

Hell, they predated the cinematic Avengers. Maybe Steve Rogers thought he was on the Jersey Shore!

Anyway, the reason I discuss this once-topical show is because the erstwhile “JWoww”, real name Jenni Farley, is the director and screenwriter of today’s movie, Devon. It’s Farley’s directorial debut, and it has generated some amount of social media buzz.

The story of Devon is of five adventurers who have been drafted by the family of a missing girl named Devon. Devon was institutionalized at a creepy and archaic facility, and when it was shut down, the girl went missing. Years later, Devon’s family is offering $100,000 for anyone that can find any evidence of Devon or her fate.

That brings together Kat, Carly, Allyson, William, and Jared at the decrepit old building to look for the clues and hopefully split the reward. As they meet, and some members immediately rub others the wrong way, they enter the facility and quickly find themselves locked in.

Simultaneously–to us the viewers, at least–we see Allyson rescued and in police custody as she answers questions about what happened to her and her teammates. Over the course of the movie, we find out what happened to the five of them.

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ When you make it through the rest of the movie, you are treated to a reveal you are unlikely to have seen coming. Everything leading up to the resolution is pretty standard stuff–we’ll get to that in a moment–but the ending shows real signs of promise for Jenni Farley as a writer and director.

The climax here pays off moments we have seen earlier in the movie, too; it’s not just a reveal for the sake of having one. The movie definitely builds up to it. I obviously don’t want to get into spoiler territory, so I’m keeping this vague, but yeah… I dug the ending here.

+ Devon is a quick and breezy 72 minutes long. It would be easy for a young, new director and screenwriter like Farley to overindulge and stretch her debut film out longer than it needs to be. But she shows a lot of maturity to recognize how long her movie had plot for and to keep it at a reasonable length. Always appreciated!

– Ultimately, where Ms. Farley’s inexperience is on display is in the fact that there is no new ground broken here whatsoever. Devon is every low-budget found footage movie you have seen before. There is a lot of shaky cam and not a lot of focus on things. You have camera glitches when the horror is near. Lots of shots of just darkness with black screens. Watching Devon brings to mind a lot of feelings like “I’ve been here before”. Hell, I’ve seen a better version of this same concept this year; it was called Underground.

There are some interspersed scenes of the present with the lone survivor of the Devon investigation, and those are a nice addition to the formula, but it’s just not enough to save the underground scenes. You have high hopes you will tread some new ground early on when the characters discuss sticking together, but don’t worry… once panic sets in, they all split up and lose each other. 

– Overall, the writing and the dialogue just aren’t wildly inspired here. It’s a shame because the acting is trying its best to make everything work, but nothing in the dialogue is really worth noting. The characters all have a trait that that they repeat or focus on ad nauseam. It gets a little tedious hearing that Kat is a mom or Carly was cut off by her daddy or Jared is a recovering addict who was a handful for his mother. These one-note characters can’t help but repeatedly state their conditions.

It’s not necessarily that the writing is bad, but going back to the previous Down, this is all so generic and underwhelming. It feels like a movie that should have come out twenty years ago.

OVERALL

Devon is, especially at its length, an okay watch. You could certainly do worse and have to sit through longer movies. But ultimately, there’s just not anything worthwhile here that you have not seen before. Even as someone who generally appreciates found footage movies, this just didn’t land for me as much as I had hoped it would. Still, to her credit, Ms. Farley shows some amount of chops should she continue down this career path.