Forever the alpha of The Jersey Shore, Jenni “JWoww” Farley was long the scariest member of the original crew. As she towered over her best friend and frequent screen partner Snooki, JWoww menaced the Shore Store’s resident dickheads, who were busy chugging Ron Ron Juice, making out with two girls, and putting their heads in between a cocktail waitress’ breasts. Some of those dickheads have finally grown up, but as the Situation found sobriety and became one of reality television’s most inspiring redemption stories, JWoww has gone darker.
Released earlier this week, the trailer DEVON, a found footage horror movie sprung from the twisted mind of Jenni “JWoww” Farley DEVON, doesn’t waste much time bringing the auteur’s aesthetic inclinations to the fore. Farley introduces viewers to news anchor Kimberly Kravitz, who presumably spent much of her life inside one of Ocean County, New Jersey’s famed tan and blow-out salons (so much so that it took us a second to determine that Kravitz wasn’t, in fact, JWoww). In a Blair Witch brush with pretending all this is real, Kravitz tells us the names of the “missing” stars of the film, interspersed with footage of them screaming in the dark. The movie follows “five adventurers” to the abandoned asylum that doubles as the last known whereabouts of a missing girl named Devon, a.k.a. DEVON.
The trailer pitches something akin to TikTok hit Megan Is Missing or, more accurately, the old MTV show Fear and the show’s nearest descendent Ghost Adventures. Yes, we’ve regressed to camera vests tracking the screaming faces of twenty-somethings as they traverse a lightly haunted basement. Thankfully, because this is a 72-minute horror movie, viewers will likely see something other than Zak Bagans yelling about the temperature, but not much more.
Look, we were as curious as anyone would be when we heard JWoww made a horror movie, and she is bringing a much stricter formal conceit to DEVON than we were expecting. Now that the credit due has been paid, DEVON looks like an episode of Fear, which, to offer more credit, was a pretty scary show when this writer was in seventh grade. However, some of Fear’s success has to be due to the Godsmack effect. If DEVON opens with “Voodoo,” we may have another low-budget horror hit on our hands.
Released by Cineverse, DEVON is coming to the company’s Screambox streamer just in time for Halloween on November 12.
