THE LAST EXORCISM is demonized by worn out ideas (review)

Rating:  (Mediocre)

The Last Exorcism is so easy an idea, you can practically take minutes on the meeting where some Hollywood exec approved it. The math is perfect: The Exorcist + Paranormal Activity = bank. Exorcism movies have been popular for nearly 40 years and moviegoers came to see Paranormal in droves last Halloween for its low-budget handcam realism. Re-energize a moneymaking brand with a hot new gimmick -- it's why Saw VII is called Saw 3D. 

Fortunately for us, Andrew Gurland and Huck Botko's Last Exorcism screenplay is smarter than a Blair Witch descendent should be. In its best moments, the movie feels more like an extended episode of The Office than a horror film. Sadly, as we know it must, the plot turns its back on sanity in the end, and that's no fun.

Minister Athiest

Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) is an evangelical minister who doesn't really believe what he's preaching. Bragging to the camera, he claims that he can say anything during a sermon, including banana nut bread. Sure enough, he shows the whole process of baking bread to much applause, proving that it doesn't really matter what he says; it's all about the act. This documentary, he explains to us, is about exposing how fake exorcisms are. And after a few jokes, he takes us on a trip to watch him perform his last exorcism, claiming that exposing the lie may save lives. In rare cases, exorcisms are lethal. 

His last exorcism: picked at random. A father claims his daughter Nell, a girl who looks remarkably like Elizabeth Perkins (Weeds), has been eating the guts out of his livestock. He performs his show, she does the usual possessed things like vomiting, cracking her neck all up, flying, talking crazy, etc. You know the drill, and if you don't, go see The Exorcist (1973) because it's the best of these movies. Anyway, the kink here is whether she's really possessed. Is she?

Typical Mistakes

Marcus may be a snarky minister, but he isn't any smarter than your average horror movie character. The camera crew and he make tons of juvenile mistakes. They walk around in the dark when they could turn on lights; unarmed, they chase someone who has a knife; and they constantly think they are safe, despite obvious warnings that they are in imminent, escalating danger. It makes for a good, but ultimately tame, show. The comedy is more potent than the horror. Was that the goal? I'm not so sure.

Hand-cams are so hot right now. Everybody wants their horror movie to have a handcam. Monster movies, Zombie movies, anything. The theory is, it's scarier when you think it might be real. Oddly, The Last Exorcism, proves that the opposite can happen too--with a slow enough pace and sarcastic enough script, you can make people laugh during an exorcism.

The Last Exorcism would have been great as a fake documentary, but nobody exorcised the real demon here: Hollywood's demand that this film become the sum of its parts.