The Last Exorcism (2010)

Far from being the catastrophically bad, vomit-filled, cheap-tricks exorcism film that I was expecting from something with only two stars on Love Film, The Last Exorcism actually managed to entertain me throughout its entire length and I’d possibly even go so far as to say I actually enjoyed it. This is not my preferred genre of film so maybe it benefitted from me not being able to compare it with other, better, examples of the exorcism theme. It was a novelty, a temporary venture into demon-based horror, and novelties are always fun.

The Last Exorcism takes the form of a mock-documentary about the life of the Reverend Cotton Marcus – an evangelical priest who has been performing exorcisms for years. He doesn’t actually believe in demons though, so comes equipped with various gadgets and tricks to provide the right atmosphere and generally scare the shit out of everyone. What a nice man. This documentary is for him to show everyone that exorcisms are scams, to educate the extreme Christian mentalists and stop things getting out of control.

After picking a begging letter at random, he travels with the film crew to a house in the middle of nowhere in Louisiana. Here he meets Louis Sweetzer, who is convinced his daughter Nell is possessed. One fake exorcism later and the problem doesn’t seem to be solved, in fact it probably gets worse. And it all goes wrong from there really – Nell’s behaviour gets progressively more erratic and disturbing and the scary eyes come out. Cue forty-five minutes of odd noises, sinister prophesies, strange behaviour from everybody involved and an emerging back-story that many or may not explain everything without the need to involve the Devil.

There’s always a danger with hand-held cameras of it all going a bit Blair Witch. This unfortunately does happen towards the end what with the running and the trees and the heavy breathing but it’s mostly fine – this is a ‘professional’ film-crew after all and the documentary feel does hold through most of the film.

This being a horror and everything and an 18 certificate, I assume you’re supposed to find it scary. Perhaps if it was night-time and I was paying proper attention it would have been, but as it was it just wasn’t good enough. During the scary bits I was usually laughing at something rubbish a couple of minutes before and that does detract from the atmosphere and suspense somewhat. The girl is scary-looking enough though and that’s all you need to be called a horror. She has good scary-eyes and sufficiently lank hair, but she’s no match for the girl from the Ring. That was one kid you do not want to find in the corner of your (unnecessarily dark) room.

There’s also a strange brother that I think was under-used. He managed a very impressive balance of red-neck, religious zeal and social-ineptitude that was really rather unnerving. He added a lot to the feel of the film and I would have liked to see more of him.

We were looking for a shit film when we decided to watch this, and a shit film is what we found. Some parts are really quite laughable and we never did find out what was actually going on behind all the drama. Overall though it was very acceptable and it served its purpose very nicely.