DVDanger: June

Kids today, with their demonic possessions and their ends of the world: June fits neatly into the "spooky kids doing spooky things" genre.

If horror movies have taught us anything, it's that children are awful. From the prenatal peril of Rosemary's Baby to Carrie's graduation gore, the genre has become the ultimate argument for birth control. So, unsurprisingly, elementary school evil pervades every frame of June.

There's no dancing around this devil in the manger. The first sighting of the titular June is as a baby, while a robe-wearing Satanic cult tries to summon up an evil spirit called Aer to possess the mewling infant. Of course, this ritual goes awry when a teenager breaks the summoning. Nine years later, June (Kennedy Brice, The Walking Dead) is being bounced from foster home to foster home, finally ending up with nice, childless middle-class couple Lily (Victoria Pratt, Cleopatra 2525) and Dave (Starship Troopers' Casper Van Dien). They laugh, they cry, they go camping, Aer sends objects flying through the air, they toast marshmallows, June stops a rainstorm just by yelling at it. You know, normal possessed kids stuff.

Writer/director L. Gustavo Cooper dabbled in similar infantile evil with 2013's The Devil Incarnate (aka Copiii: The 1st Entry aka Cursed), but it's not like he was treading a new path then. The twist here is that most everyone around June seems to know that June is possessed (or at least that's what every loaded, nudge-nudge, wink-wink conversation implies). A heavy-handed voiceover makes it clear that Lily is in the know, since she was the teen that rescued June in the first place. June's shrink seems to know, the adoption agency knows, everyone knows.

Well, except Dave, the true hero of the film. Horror heroes generally are the ones that save the day by dealing with the monster. Not Dave. He hews to the tradition of characters like Carter from low-budget H.P. Lovecraft adaption The Unnamable (aka Carter the Unstoppable Sense Machine, who tells his doomed friends, "No, you go to the haunted house and get butchered, I'll stay in the well-lit library and solve everything with a magic spell from nowhere near the monster.") Dave's the one that, as soon as it's patently clear that his new stepdaughter is demonically possessed, starts suggesting that having a demonically possessed stepdaughter around the house is a bad idea. Or at least that the adoption agency should have mentioned this, like a realtor mentioning you're moving into a murder house. Instead, while everyone else is doing the standard "We can cure her," or "We can use her powers mwuh-ha-ha-ha-ha," Dave's response is, "Demon kid? I'm out."

Of course, he foolishly gets dragged back in, although there's some fun tension when Lily explains that, oh, yeah, she used to be a demon worshipper. That's awkward, and in a smarter movie would be grounds for hilarity.

Instead, June is neither witty enough to be subversive, nor stylish enough to be ranked alongside the gloriously melodramatic Orphan or Dark Touch. A fake 1982 documentary included as an extra shows there was something a little deeper at play here. It rewrites Aer as a Gaia figure waiting to eradicate humanity, and includes a line about child possession as a social services issue that is either clunky as hell or deadpan brilliance.

In fact, the extras are far more interesting that the film itself, especially with the addition of a social services video file. Having June described by a succession of former foster families is infinitely more intriguing and spooky than what the feature achieves by showing her.

June (RLJ Entertainment) is available now on DVD and digital platforms.

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