The Last Exorcism: Movie Review

"If you believe in God you must also believe in the Devil" is the tag line to producer Eli Roth's The Last Exorcism. Daniel Stamm helms the director chair of this Blair Witch'esque film. The plot revolves around Reverend Marcus Cotton (Patrick Fabian) who has performed dozens of exorcism-shams over his lifetime as a preacher. When Reverend Cotton hears of an exorcism gone wrong with a child is killed he starts to question his belief in God and decides to quit his life as a preacher and exorcist. On a final exit note he decides to make a documentary exposing exorcism for what it is, a sham. He picks a 'help me' letter which sends him into Idlewood, Louisiana to exorcise the demon Abalom out of a young girl, Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell). While Reverend Cotton believes the supernatural aspects surrounding Nell aren't really her actions he performs a mock-exorcism (which he's used to doing) and leaves only to find that nothing changes, in fact everything escalates bringing forth her actual demons.

This movie is everything wrong with horror films. It is supposed to be a supernatural thriller, with no thrills. We've seen the fake documentary horror films before with The Blair Witch Project and even to some extent Paranormal Activity.  This film is so boring, nothing happens. Every time you think somethings about to happen... nothing happens. We hear thumping coming from Nell's locked room. The documentary crew storm in... no one is there... oh wait, Nell is sitting on top of her dresser. Everyone goes back to doing nothing. We hear shrieks coming from a non-existent child only to find Nell drowning a doll in a bath tub. The thrilling moments are held together by the intensity of wondering what could happen, only to become anti-climatic with absolutely nothing coming out of the intensity.

The ending is also seen a million miles away. First off, and sorry if I ruin this for you, the film is lost footage. Unless you live under a rock and have never seen or heard anything about this film you will know that as the marketing strategies all talk about this lost footage being found. So obviously it's not a favourable outcome. And not even thirty minutes into the movie the director point blankly literally points to a picture and says: this is how everyone dies. AND THEN the characters talk about it for 5 minutes which just assures us as an audience that that's how the main characters will eventually be destroyed. Also - I don't feel bad for saying any of that as horror movies are 99% tragic. They are the exception to being able to have a tragic ending. And while The Last Exorcism is so much more boring than scary the tragic ending is the only trait that keeps in style with horror films. Writers Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland have never written a successful horror film in their lives, their resume is filled with raunchy-teenage 'comedies'. And I think they should stick to ruining that genre as the horror genre has been ruined by many others countless times over.

As for the acting, well Patrick Fabian wasn't a bad actor, he held this pitiful piece of shit together... as for Ashley Bell (the other lead) I couldn't get past the fact that she looks like Michael Cera with a wig, and therefore was waiting for her to start to hit on a hotter girl that is obviously out of her league.

This movie is a waste of 80 minutes. Over hearing comments as I left the film everyone else hated the film too. I tried so hard to like this film, and it had so much potential - yet nothing of substance happened. Nothing scary happened. Nothing worth making this film watchable happened. You keep getting sucked into the intensity of the film only to be let down with all the anti-climatic plot turns. The final 10 minutes is also the most ridiculous moments I have ever seen in a movie. They reminded me of Nicolas Cage's remake of The Wicker Man. So all I can say is: don't bother with this movie.

1 out of 5 stars.