The Last Exorcism (2010)

Directed by: Daniel Stamm
Written by: Huck Botko, Andrew Gurland
Cast: Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Iris Bahr, Louis Herthum, Caleb Landry Jones

Reverend Cotton Marcus has had his fill of being a fraud.

A life-long evangelical minister, Marcus has conducted numerous exorcisms all in the good name of making money. "The Church doesn't run on love," he says with a smile, referring to the fact that the practice is his primary income. But his disillusionment has peaked and brought about a need to repent; Marcus has agreed to allow a documentary team film his fraud in action in order to blow the cover on the business of evangelical exorcisms.

Marcus randomly picks the family he'll work with by opening the first letter on top of the pile on his desk. This letter leads him to a farmer in a very rural area of Louisiana, who swears his daughter Nell has become possessed by a demonic power and is causing the death of his livestock and just may do worse. Reverend Marcus slips into character with practiced ease, and goes about committing his fraud in a skilled and admittedly entertaining manner. The man is good. However, events start to progress in unexpected directions, and Nell shows signs of something that Marcus has never ever seen in his petty and unethical career – a potentially real and true possession by a major demonic power.

This is the big question of the movie, and – just like in real life – no one should expect to go away with any answers. Is Nell possessed by a demon from the hoary pit of infernal damnation, or is she just seriously troubled? I have no idea, but I do know that the circumstances manage to get significantly creepy and definitely hair-raising, at least before the film crumbles into its final reveal of silliness.

The entire initial setup is brilliantly done. What we're seeing here is a documentary, exposing something that certainly has occasion to occur in the world. Similarly, the acting throughout the film is skilled stuff. Patrick Fabian and Ashley Bell are both magnificent in their roles of the troubled minister and young possessed Nell, and Caleb Landry Jones is perfect in as Nell's shady brother. The casting was simply on-the-nose and was very effective in setting the stage for an intriguing investigative documentary.

Similarly, many of the scares are expertly done. Nell melts down in a cataclysmic fashion, and suddenly it seems a bit of hell is creeping out of the shadows of the small rural farm. These scenes are very suspenseful and will have some audience members on the edge of their seats. The interesting thing is that Nell is never shown doing anything truly impossible – rather only merely highly unlikely. This allows the film to skirt the line and not provide an obvious answer on whether Nell is truly possessed or simply very, very disturbed.

On this note I would like to draw an exception to a certain poster being tossed about for this film featuring Nell crouching impossibly in the high corner of a ceiling, denying all known understanding of gravity and physics. This is obviously not possible, and would have answered the question of whether she was really serving as a halfway home for a lost demon or not. This scene never occurs, at all, in the movie. Wall crawling is not within Nell's demonstrable powers, and this shot is simply the result of some rather misguided marketing that took things too far. There is a different poster of her bending over backwards in a seemingly impossible way (this is the poster shown above) - and this absolutely is in the film. The interesting thing about this trick is - it is not CGI. Actress Ashley Bell is amazingly double jointed and pulled this trick off all by herself. I wish I could do that at parties. Great stuff.

While The Last Exorcism has so much going for it, it still trips and stumbles in several ways. Things get seriously hairy out at the farm, so much that any reasonable person would be grabbing the cell phone to call the local police. However, our documentary film crew never does this, nor is it even discussed. They don't even try the "the cell phone has no reception!" trick, which, while trite, is better than just pretending cell phones don't exist. They entirely ignore the fact that the government provides a law enforcement agency, available on call, which will come out and stop shotgun toting madmen and psychotic teenage girls – all for free!

Another fracture to the suspension of disbelief is in the music. The score of the film is well done, rather subtle, and it only kicks in during the dark and scary bits. It does effectively accentuate the tension, which is what it is supposed to do – but then, why is it there at all? The Last Exorcism falls into the "lost footage" category of pseudo-documentary horror films, and supposedly hasn't been edited. So, who found the tape, and then edited in scary music? It just doesn't make any sense.

The strongest blow against it is the ending. It goes in a direction that few (if any) will expect, and most won't expect it because it's ridiculous. It's hard to expect the ridiculous. It's a punch-line verging on the unintentionally funny rather than truly scary. While it did make me giggle - and I enjoy a good giggle as much as anyone else - its silliness makes a lark of the beautiful setup that went down in the first two acts.

The Last Exorcism is PG-13 and, said flaws aside for the moment, is a good example of how to make an entertaining film with such a restricted rating. There are not many well done PG-13 horror films, as the restrictions of the rating are significant enough to rip the scary out of most movies. For every well done PG-13 film, such as The Ring or Drag Me to Hell, there is at least another dozen films that absolutely suck. Even with its flaws, The Last Exorcism should be sorted with other effective PG-13 films for the brilliant setup and scares of its first two acts.

The Last Exorcism is a great film hiding in an oversized clown suit of a bad last act punch-line. It's a shame that a little more thought wasn't spent on the flaws described, but the fact remains this is still a film that has some effective scares that are likely to entertain quite a few. It does feature great acting, perfect casting, and some high tension scary moments – just be prepared for the last act when the clowns wheel in on their unicycles to make animal balloons out of old intestines and kidneys.

Rating: (3.5 out of 5):