Exorcism’s Last Gasps a Groan
The Last Exorcism is surprisingly great for maybe roughly 80 minutes of its 88-minute running time. It is funny when it needs to be funny, dramatic when the scenes need to be dramatic and unnervingly scary at all the expected (and even a lot of the unexpected) places. It’s wonderfully acted by stars Patrick Fabian and Ashley Bell, and for a horror subgenre that has more or less worn out its welcome director Daniel Stamm and writers Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland get so much right it’s hard not to come away from a screening at least moderately impressed.
Ashley Bell gets carried away in The Last Exorcism © Lionsgate
Then come the final two or tree minutes. Cohesion goes flying out the window. Common sense, too. So does credibility, the last moments devolving into an unintentionally hysterical series of events so insanely stupid it made the preview audience I saw the picture with visibly upset. All goodwill is erased in a heartbeat, and if just thinking about those last images wasn’t making me laugh I’d probably be furious at the filmmakers for destroying what was until the climax a pretty darn great example of B-grade horror.
The movie is another in the growingly tiresome “found footage” genre, this one revolving around a pastor, Cotton Marcus (Fabian), who has lost his faith and decides to prove once and for all the exorcisms he and many of his compatriots have been conducting over the years are nothing more than outright shams. Heading to Louisiana with a documentary film crew in tow, he is asked to come to the aid of young Nell Sweetzer (Bell), a teenager her devote father Louis (Louis Herthum) thinks is possessed by a demon.
Yet as played out as this particular concept is in the hands of Stamm and company it actually works pretty darn well. The filmmakers understand that humor, when used properly, organically, can help increase believability, making the coming twists and turns more realistic and thusly suspenseful and tense. They craft interesting characters worth following making Cotton complex yet relatable and Nell a tragically sympathetic figure that as things progressed I really began to care for.
Both Fabian and Bell are outstanding. The main reason I enjoyed as much of this picture as I did was largely due to them. They just own these two characters, body and soul, adding dimension and depth with a passion and an energy the script largely only hints at. They’re just plain fun to watch, and whether they’re cracking wise about the exorcism tricks of the trade or are covered in blood coming up with creepy moves not even Linda Blair could have thought of they held me captivated nearly all the way through.
It’s all going fine until the ending that I can’t really talk about in detail because it would then ruin the experience of seeing the movie. But then, it is that ending that itself completely spoils the experience of seeing the movie, so part of me wishes I could go into far more detail than I actually in good conscience can. Let’s just say it adds elements that are stupid and (sort of, there are some vague hints so I can’t be definitive) out of leftfield. Worse, it hangs the audience completely out to dry, sending them out of the theatre with a collective groan instead anything close to positive. They were laughing about it as they headed out the door, yakking to their friends about the sequence’s outright stupidity shaking their heads in far more disbelief than I was.
All of which is really too bad because for a while there The Last Exorcism had possessed me with its sinisterly horrific makeup. It got under my skin and had me under its spell, and over two-thirds in I was positive I’d be writing a surprising rave about the great new film filled with thrills, chills and scares.
But a shoddy finale can change everything, a last two minutes spoiling things to such an extent my rave twisted and turned into a disappointing pan. In the end, this thriller becomes a laughable excuse for a motion picture, the true horror being just how quickly a great movie can become a horrible one and how sad it can be to sit inside a theatre witnessing it for one’s self.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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