A relatively entertaining but incredibly derivative and badly-acted found footage movie, "The Devil's Familiar" clocks in at just under an hour, never wearing out its welcome but also doing nothing particularly well. It's as if Kieran Edwards made a checklist of all the found footage tropes he could think of and decided to throw them all into this story about a couple of student filmmakers investigating allegations of a mythical man-eating beast, in the hopes that something might stick. And, to be fair, it is kind of fun to see the film morph into something more than a standard cryptid mockumentary horror, even if it doesn't add up to a coherent whole and leans just a little too much into "The Blair Witch Project" territory for my liking. Anyway, I've seen much worse micro-budget horror than this one, which is at least made with a modicum of heart. The use of plastic Halloween props for the gore scenes was kind of cute, too.
