THE LAST EXORCISM

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Genre Embarrassment
Friedkin's "Exorcist" is Still the "Last"
By Cole Smithey

More a sketch of an idea for a horror movie than a fully formed film "The Last Exorcism" is a yawn-inducing attempt to cash in on a combination of exhausted genre tropes.

Following in the shaky-cam, found-footage, footsteps of "The Blair Witch Project," Daniel Stamm directs an incompetent script about Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian).

Cotton is a religious fraud engaged in carrying on his family's well-established business of conducting exorcisms for illiterate backwoods types who traditionally respond well to the power of material-supported suggestion. An evangelical magician/con man, Cotton takes along a couple of documentarians — the cameraman is never shown but the annoying sound girl (Iris Bahr) can't keep her mouth shut — to record his experiences as a way of coming clean about his dicey religious practices.

The trio go on a road trip to rural Louisiana where Louis Sweetzer, a fundamentalist farmer, believes his daughter Nell (Ashley Bell) is possessed and is responsible for killing their livestock in the dead of night. Home-schooled Nell turns out to be quite a contortionist when the opportunity presents itself, and her freaky brother Caleb (Caleb Landry Jones) is just as threatening as their dad turns out to be. Riddled with poor lighting, inappropriate use of music, and a plot you could fit in a tea cup, "The Last Exorcism" has all the appeal of a glorified, but poorly shot, student film.

"The Last Exorcism" is set up as a fairly traditional documentary. Cotton Marcus and his dad give direct-to-camera interviews about their family, and we get introduced to Cotton's wife and young son who must use a hearing aid. The boy knows that daddy is really an atheist and has a sense of humor about his dad's hypocrisy. If the character development is slapdash, we don't mind so much because there are secrets on the table.

Anyone who has seen William Friedkin's masterpiece "The Exorcist" knows that the movie spends a lot of time establishing the characters of the young priest, the mom, and the innocent little girl who will become unrecognizable by the film's shocking third act that's spent on the exorcism itself.

It's a lesson that the filmmakers here would have been wise to learn. Instead of establishing any of its characters beyond a thumbnail sketch, screenwriters Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland rush into the exorcism with no idea of how or why the promised event should constitute the finality of the film's title.

Before the exorcism, the family waits outside Nell's bedroom while Cotton surreptitiously preps the room with candles, fishing line, and whatever little magic trick effects he plans to employ during the procedure. Cotton is shown as a master of his destiny, and that of the people he cons into believing that he will exorcise of their demons. 

But then the premature and surprisingly brief exorcism takes place. Cotton apes the priest in Friedkin's film when he demands oh so sincerely that the demon take him instead of the girl. His pre-rigged crucifix emits a few puffs of smoke and bingo, all is done. We know it is us, the audience, that has been conned.

The filmmakers squander their only opportunity at raising the stakes of the story into the realm of the supernatural. It's not enough to kill off your protagonist and his helpers in a fit of "Rosemary's Baby" plot-grafting. What if Cotton had accidentally gotten it right, and it really was the demon Abalam tormenting the girl. And what if the demon really did choose to occupy Cotton's body for an extended tour of duty. Then "The Last Exorcism" might have had somewhere to go.

If you want to see a competent horror film, I highly recommend going back and watching "The Exorcist" and Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby." By that comparison, "The Last Exorcism" is a comedy.

Rated PG-13. 90 mins.