SUMMER OF BLOOD: 21st CENTURY HORROR - YE OF LITTLE FAITH

There are many horror movies that are good until the last act, when they turn into such complete shit that it's frankly hard to remember what was good about everything up to that point. Many horror movies. The Last Exorcism, from 2010, is not necessarily distinct within that company; it does not start at the highest height, nor does it reach the lowest low. But it does stand out for how brief the bad ending actually is: only about 12 minutes before the credits is all it takes to undo the goodwill generated by a generally sturdy 74 minutes preceding.

We'll return to those 12 minutes in due course; for now, it does to accentuate the positive. To begin with, The Last Exorcism is one of those faux-documentary jobs, right before they really took off. I swear, that's one of the positive things, even though I know all the terrible things people say about the inaptly-named found footage style. I have, after all, said a great many of them. That's exactly the thing that's so nifty about the movie though (in fact, it's probably its most distinctive strength): there's a really smart, motivated reason for almost every frame of the movie that we see to have been recorded by the in-universe cameraman, Daniel Moskowitz (Adam Grimes), and his director, documentarian Iris Reisen (Iris Bahr). They are, after all, making a documentary about a charismatic exorcist, Rev. Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian). They don't know at the start that he'll be called on an exorcism, but they undoubtedly had their fingers crossed. The spooky, threatening incidents that usually trigger the wave of "put the camera down and run, dipshit" complaints are going to have the exact opposite effect on them: that is exactly what they want to film. Iris probably spends every night wishing herself to sleep that there will be some alarming, inexplicable terror to rattle her and Daniel around the room. And the way the footage is presented is exactly like an assembly cut that needs onscreen titles and some sweetening to the sound. Mind you, the film's ending commits the usual sins, and they are magnified by how solid everything up to that point has been: the way the story wraps up makes it clear that nobody would have cut the film together, and if they had, we'd never have seen it. But before then! In terms of sheer formal plausibility, it's as tight as any other found footage movie since the airtight The Blair Witch Project.

The content of Huck Botko & Andrew Gurland's script isn't too shabby itself, though it does tend to err on the side of self-congratulation. Cotton is the very definition of a good ol' boy blood & thunder preacher: anxious to give his parishioners a good show even while he's assuring them that if they make even the slightest misstep, they'll be devoured by the eternal flames of Hell. It's hardcore conservative Evangelical Protestantism with a healthy dose of Manichaeism, and it's all perfectly fraudulent. As Cotton concedes with a startling lack of shame for a man staring directly into a camera lens, he had a crippling crisis of faith when his sickly son was healed and his immediate response was to be grateful for the doctors, not God. Later on a news article about a boy his son's age died during a botched exorcism, and that shook the rest of his belief out; now he's going through the motions strictly for the benefit of his flock, on the assumption that as long as his words improve their lives, there's no harm done. "You've been a fraud", Iris accuses him, with an obvious "gotcha" tone; "That's your word, not mine", he tosses back with a big smile.

These Elmer Gantry-esque exploration of the pastor as con man and huckster are tremendously engaging, thanks almost completely to Fabian's sweeping, gregarious performance, all broad smiles and large gestures and a big way of dominating the room. He's slimy and slick, but in a way that invites us to join him in his fun trickery; his early demonstration that a recipe for banana bread can be slid into a fired-up sermon without anybody noticing is, to me, the film's most unique and enjoyable moment. The only problem with all this is that it's frankly a bit easy: taking potshots at charismatic preachers and then smirking like some kind of wounding hit has been taken is the pettiest, littlest kind of smug urbanity. We've seen this before; the charm of Fabian's performance augments that truth, but doesn't fix it.

Then again, we've seen just about everything The Last Exorcism has to offer, if we've seen more than one or two movies with "Exorcism" or "Exorcist" in the title, and the audience for a found-footage demonic possession movie is nothing if not self-selecting along those lines. Cotton gets a particularly intriguing request from a rural family, begging for help with a possession; its hand-written nature appeals to him, so off he and the filmmakers go to find out what's happening. 16-year-old Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell) has been acting peculiar, if slaughtering her father's livestock can be summed up with such a simple word as "peculiar". Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum) subscribes to the most archly paranoiac type of faith; he pulled his daughter and son from school because she wasn't being exposed to sufficiently Godly music in art class, among more typical reasons. He even stopped going to church with local Pastor Manley (Tony Bentley), presumably for not enough old time religion. Cotton, for his part, puts on a good show, using some electric doodads to convince the Sweetzers, including elder child Caleb (Caleb Landry Jones) that he's chasing a demon out of the girl, and calls it a good deed. But when Nell shows up at his hotel, he grows concerned that something deeper than the usual psychosomatic Sturm und Drang is going on, so he forced Louis to have her hospitalised, over the man's terror of modern medicine. And it just so happens that Nell is pregnant. Cotton and Iris immediately jump to the assumption that she's been raped by her father, but this is a movie called The Last Exorcism, and we can be forgiven for assuming it's a little more sneaky than that.

But not sneaky in the way you'd think: the idea the film starts to play around with is that Nell is suffering from a bad case of being 16 years old and having a desire to express her sexuality while trapped in an environment of severest repressions (it becomes clear later in the movie that Louis would much rather assume that his daughter has been raped than that she had sex of her own choosing). And so she has sublimated her desire to have sex and break away from her insanely puritanical family life into the form of a made-up trickster demon named Abalam, because movie demons have the worst fucking names.* But at least it lacks the slurry Zs of "Pazuzu". Sorry The Exorcist, but you have a goofy-sounding bad guy.

None of this is, as such, particularly new or exciting or brave, and like many and many an exorcism film before it, The Last Exorcism doesn't work very hard to enter into the actual possession victim's head, if only because it needs very hard to keep us wondering if she's suffering from paranormal or strictly psychological torments (for a much better experiment in the same mode, we have the 2006 German film Requiem). In The Exorcist, they could get away with that; it is a film mostly about the responses people have to the possession. Here, they cannot. Cotton starts out with a very Father Karras-ish plot arc as the man of the cloth who's lost his faith and must regain it by fighting with actual spiritual evil, but the film maintains the possibility that there is no demon for so long that he's never forced to do anything but reiterate that, as always, he's right and it's just one big psychosomatic stress. Besides, he instantly ceases to be an interesting, colorful character when he arrives at the Sweetzer home. Louis is mostly there to be nervous and plaintive - Herthum works much too hard to make the character likable, which helps in complicating the script's self-superior attitude, but not for adding an edge to the suggestion that Nell has been driven crazy by a wretch of father - and Caleb is only ever on the sidelines, which means that we're basically watching activity being performed rather than characters having feelings.

And so, for all its stabs at complexity, The Last Exorcism proves to be pretty much a generic spook show, with the usual guttural speech and self-mutilation of all the other exorcism movies. It has one strikingly original and deeply disturbing gore scene, when Nell uses the camera to beat a cat to death - its blood remains streaked on the lens for quite some time - but director Daniel Stamm otherwise offers no personalising touches to a movie that has only the gritty cheapness of the first person aesthetic to differentiate itself from 37 years of Exorcist knock-offs. Still, it acquits itself well enough for all of that; the last big exorcism movie prior to 2010 was The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and The Last Exorcism movie beats that one senseless.

So the film heads into the final stretch with a steady gait and head held high, and then it trips and head-plants into the asphalt. I'm not sure when exactly the set the marker for the film's descent into total garbage; the extremely ill-timed interview with an awkward gay teen boy (Logan Craig Reid) whom Nell had named as the real father of her non-demonic baby is the first point that I said loud, in an empty room "Well, what the fuck". Certainly, by the point that Stamm crash-zooms into a pentagram painted on the Sweetzers' wall as the music gives us the most generic sting (so much for found-footage artlessness), it's all over but the tetchy wind-down, as the film erases its ambiguity in the most speedy, arbitrary series of twists, reveals, and ginned-up jump scares possible, complete with a sudden flurry of death because, dammit, this was a horror movie, and we had best leave nobody alive, right?

It's not the most sudden nosedive in quality a horror film could take; strictly limiting ourselves to movies that premiered in 2010, it's not as calling as the third act descent into putresence that mars the splendid opening hour of Insidious. But it's still enormously misconceived and stupidly blunt, and the moderate strengths of The Last Exorcism up to that point aren't able to survive it.

Body Count: 3, with a 4th who's clearly going to die pretty soon. Also that poor cat.

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LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION

In 2005 and 2006, a pair of movies were released, both broadly based on the same real-life story of Annaliese Michel, who died in 1976 at the age of 23, after an exorcism gone wrong. The latter film was Requiem, a German production that raised more questions than it answered, allowing for the possibility that its Annaliese-surrogate had truly been possessed but also that she was merely suffering from a mental disorder that was tragically misdiagnosed by overzealous religious types. The earlier film was The Exorcism of Emily Rose, an American film about how demonic possession is totally real and fuck science for saying otherwise. It was also the first theatrical feature in the highly disposable career of director Scott Derrickson, who has since failed his way up to getting named as the director of Marvel's upcoming Doctor Strange.

So Derrickson's newest film, Deliver Us from Evil, comes to us with an immaculately precise "inspired by" credit, and much like Emily Rose, that appears to have meant, in practice, "we are aware that reality exists, and it's entirely possible that some of it got into our movie by accident". It's not quite as much of a piece of pro-exorcism cheerleading, other than the genre-required bit where the protagonist starts out as an agnostic, until the power of Christ compels him, and this is at least something that is actually true to the life experience of Ralph Sarchie, a New York cop turned demonologist and namesake of the film's protagonist with whom he shares some biographical details and very little curriculum vitae (the biggie is that the film is entirely about an evil carried home from Iraq by soldiers in 2010, while Sarchie's career only barely overlapped with the Iraq War at all, and the book which primarily inspired the film was published before the invasion).

The film's Sgt. Sarchie, played by Eric Bana with a surprisingly good Bronx-adjacent accent, is introduced to us during one of his long nasty shifts at night in the worst of the worst Bronx neighborhoods, with his adrenaline junkie partner Butler (Joel McHale, surprisingly good at channeling his comic training into a twitchy, thuggish cop), who we know to be an adrenaline junkie because Deliver Us from Evil has the kind of script - by Derrickson and frequent collaborator Paul Harris Boardman - that feels overjoyed to include lines like "Well, you're the adrenaline junkie", even when it's not germane to the plot that anybody is an adrenaline junkie, least of all a side character who exists solely to provide an extra flashlight in some of the more aggressively underlit scenes.

Anyway, all snark aside, I actually did find the first 40-odd minutes of Deliver Us from Evil to be a largely interesting synthesis of two genres, mixing the plot structure of a police procedural into the incredibly convention-bound exorcism movie (incidentally, by the end of the film's 2010 prologue scene, set in an underground cave-temple in Iraq, it's becomes hauntingly clear that this shall be ripping off, not merely The Exorcist, but Exorcist: The Beginning also. And that is a sad thing to rip off). There's something oddly bracing about watching characters who genuinely don't know that they're in a horror movie, as opposed to characters who are merely marking time until the second-act shift into over horrorising, and it's legitimately disconcerting and interesting to watch Sarchie going about the business of being an NYPD officer in the midst of urban-rot production design and unrelentingly black night cinematographer that both keep jostling us in the ribs and promising "it's a horror film! check out all this spooky atmosphere".

That does, of course, mean that when the film makes the expected shift into Sarchie's attempt to fight Spiritual Evil instead of The Evil That Men Do with the help of a convenient exorcism expert, Father Mendoza (Édgar Ramírez, whose command of English has never been wobblier, but whose hunted, scarred expressions largely balance it out), it pitches everything that has made it good in any way to become Another Damn Exorcism Movie, complete with the exact same exorcism that filmmakers have been shooting from slightly different angles for over 40 years now. The last 30 minutes of the two hour film are, no contest, the absolute worst; the bit where it goes from marginally interesting and signficantly bad to 100% boring in every possible way.

Up till then, though, the movie's actually kind of entertaining, mostly because it's so gosh-darned campy, in an old-school way that not nearly enough modern horror films manage to be. The unrelentingly gloomy cinematography by Scott Kevan is where it starts, with the film almost playing a game with us to see just how long the movie can go without showing us more than the outline of a person's head (and, for good measure, it's some of the most digital-looking digital cinematography I've seen in a long time, so crisp and focused and sharp that it just about fries your eyeballs). Then there are the dipshit staging ideas, like a soundtrack that keeps amping up creepy fake audio to deafening levels, or shows a tragic flashback fading to blood red in a fashion that is infinitely more silly than creepy. The overdone makeup on the spooky man in a hoodie (Sean Harris) who seems to be the link between all of the creep inexplicable deaths Sarchie is investigating is certainly pretty goofy, but the undisputed winner of the film's most aggresively nonsensical High Camp villain is Jane (Olivia Horton), a crazy and/or possessed lady who scuttles on all fours and speaks like the First Runner-Up at a Gollum impersonator's convention. I can't do it in text, but the way she gargles the word "speeeecialisssssst" is, for real, the funniest thing I have seen in a movie theater all summer.

The film's delightfully stupid approach to the clichés of a demonic possession movie are flavored with just enough touches of actually good filmmaking - the Bronx Zoo at night is an inspired place to shoot a horror movie, turns out - that Deliver Us from Evil manages to actually kind of be watchable. Only, I think, for a dedicated follower of the exorcism subgenre, and such devotées have a lot of practice shoveling through some real shit, even more than most of us patient horror movie fans. And a lot of that watchability is entirely ironic in nature. But good red meat for bad movie lovers doesn't tend to show up in movie theaters all that often, and the gruff-faced, laughably intense, philosophically overburdened Deliver Us from Evil does a fine job of filling that void.

3/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE DEVIL'S WORK

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: ghosts in a haunted house, demonic possession, it's all fair game in The Conjuring, a giddy old ghost story of the best campfire tradition based on the case files of noted paranormal investigators/professional frauds Ed and Lorraine Warren. Not that stories about demons and Satan need to be giddy; some of them are far too serious to think about such plebeian matters.

There are billions of people, all of whom have different opinions about things. So I assume that plenty of folks think the 2000 "Version You've Never Seen" of The Exorcist is head and shoulders better than the 1973 theatrical cut, and they owe thanks to William Peter Blatty, writer and producer of that film, and author of it source novel, and the main driving force behind the creation of the extended cut. They're also probably the best possible candidates to watch The Exorcist III, for that film, released in 1990, was the one and only Exorcist film that Blatty himself directed (it was his second and final time behind the camera), adapting it from his 1983 novel Legion. Though he was forced by the studio to make severe changes to the film's climax - changes that the filmmaker and some of his actors have stated in later years fundamentally ruined the movie, and looking at the details, it's not hard to disagree with them - this still remains the most direct delivery system of the man's ideas in cinematic form.

As one of the people who urgently doesn't prefer the Blatty cut of the original Exorcist, and largely regards most of the problems of either version as stemming from what I am inclined to call the "Blattyness" of the material, I'll admit upfront that I certainly am not the best candidate to watch The Exorcist III, and having now done so, I do not entirely care for what I saw. It's still easily the best film in the franchise after the original, if that's worth anything. After all, this is the franchise that includes Exorcist II: The Heretic, one of history's most notoriously vile sequels. We're not ranking Godfather pictures here.

Now, I have not read Legion; but on the evidence, it seems that the movie is probably more of an adaptation of that book than it is a sequel to the first movie, given the way it silently revises character relationships in directions that simply aren't compatible with what we saw in '73, which the movie insists was actually '75. It's certainly not the most complete transgression against the dignity of the original possible, regardless. Have I mentioned The Heretic yet this paragraph? Because shit, man. Blatty could have turned the material into rock-opera featuring the ghost of Father Merrin as the emcee of a discotheque in Heaven, and The Exorcist III wouldn't be as far from the spirit of the original as The Heretic was.

Surprisingly, The Exorcist III doesn't make any attempts to disavow The Heretic, fixing entirely on those characters who weren't involved with that first sequel, and never directly contradicting anything that happened there. Where we are is that Lt. William Kinderman (George C. Scott, replacing the late Lee J. Cobb) of the Washington, D.C. police is investigating the death of a 12-year-old boy, one that unnerves him for two reasons. First is the severity of its profanation of religious imagery. Second is that a few details seem to square with the case of a brutal serial killer from the '70s called Gemini, executed 15 years ago, though Blatty doesn't see fit to let us know that Kinderman picked up on this for quite a long while, one of a great many writing decisions that just don't make any damn sense. Kinderman is consulting with his friend, Father Joseph Dyer (Ed Flanders), on this most upsetting case, but it's about to start getting way more upsetting when a Catholic priest is butchered in a confessional, and Dyer himself ends up in the hospital, where he proves easy pickings to be the third victim in the apparently resurrected Gemini killer spree.

I'm glossing over a lot, but the devil is in the details, ha-ha. We figure out pretty early on - the bestial growling and overdubbed voice-of-many-tormented-souls dialogue are big tells - that the killer is possessed by a demon; the fact that the story's title is either Exorcist or Legion, depending on the medium would already have us thinking in this direction, naturally. But we're just that much smarter than Kinderman, for whom ideas about religion and spirituality simply don't matter in the day-to-day, and who doesn't start to put things together for an awfully long time. Eventually, he finds a patient in the psych ward of the hospital where he's investigating Dyer's murder, who claims to be the Gemini killer, though Kinderman is rather disturbed to find that the patient much more resembles his long-dead friend, Father Damian Karras, who last died during the successful exorcism of Regan MacNeill in the '70s. In a nifty gesture that was forced on Blatty, who used it to his advantage, the version of this character we see when he's possessed by the legion of malevolent spirits is played by Brad Dourif, while the moments that Karras's body is being left mostly alone are played by Jason Miller, who played Karras in The Exorcist. Because that is, after all, where this is going: the demon forced out of Regan, pissed at being beaten by those meddling priests, was able to manipulate the spirit of the evil Gemini killer into Karras's dead body, though it's taken a decade and a half to undo the physical corruption of his brain enough for that body to be useful as a vessel for revenge against those who played a role in casting that demon out. In the meanwhile, the Gemini has been body-hopping into the doddering old dementia patients of the same hospital, using them as meat puppets to enact the demon's will.

I guess that's a little spoilery, but 23-year-old movie and all. Anyway, you cannot possibly discuss The Exorcist III without having all that out there, because it's the only way to get across that the film feels, frankly, like Exorcist fan fiction. Surprisingly creative and internally coherent Exorcist fan fiction, but there's always a weirdness about the way this bends the characters - Karras is a demon zombie now? For real? - that simply doesn't fill a need. It feels very much like somebody was spouting off some diatribe about what they'd do with Kinderman (that obvious fan-favorite), and ending it with, "I mean, wouldn't that be so fascinating to see what would happen?" Yeah, probably. Would I have been much happier if these speculations hadn't been anointed with the legitimacy of canon? Unquestionably. Let us say that it feels like a good-faith attempt to make an Exorcist sequel that was going to come out anyway more decent than it had to be, rather than a story that thrives on its own and justified the making of a sequel.

Story aside, The Exorcist III is a mind-blowingly daft bit of moviemaking, suggesting that Blatty had seen and loved many films without ever really paying attention to how they worked. And to be entirely fair, I don't know how much of this is a direct result of the studio's tinkering and chopping; with Blatty's original cut held to no longer exist, none of us ever will (I'm guessing the studio didn't insist on all the painfully on-the-nose symbolism, though; a calling card of the unseasoned filmmaker). But it's a frightfully amateurish bit of filmmaking, primarily worthwhile for Gerry Fisher's rewardingly '70s-style cinematography.

The dialogue is stiff and talky; fine, that's kind of Blatty's thing, and The Exorcist itself bogs down far more often than its biggest fans concede in blocks of speeches about theology. But The Exorcist had William Friedkin at the height of his powers driving it forward; in The Exorcist III, an unforgivable number of dialogue scenes (that is to say, virtually all of them) are cut according to the most primitive idea of an editing pattern imaginable. One person talks: you see them in close-up. The film cuts to another person in close-up; they talk. It cuts back to the first person. Over and over. It's the absolute worst: even if you don't notice it in specific mechanical terms, it's the sort of thing that interferes with how the scenes play, reducing them to nuggets of speech that plop out, one by one, no flow between ideas and no relationship between characters. It's something that you'd only do deliberately if you were trying to make a parody of film students; first-year film students at that, because overlapping dialogue is literally one of the first things they teach you in editing class. Do we blame editors Peter Lee-Thompson and Todd C. Ramsay for this? Did Blatty simply not give them enough coverage? It's bizarre, nor is it the only editing problem: scenes pervasively and continually end a half second or so early, right at the instant that dialogue ends and not with a beat to let the film draw a breath. The net result: a film that has some of the worst flow between and within scenes that I can imagine.

And the ending (which Blatty directed, though not happily), is a fucking nightmare: comically absurd in its great big gore moment, utterly out-of-place, badly staged, confusing, and bogged down in terrible, generic exorcism movie dialogue.

It's not otherwise incompetent - though some of the looped dialogue is mixed so terribly that I'd like to believe it's on purpose, if I could imagine what that purpose might be - and in places, The Exorcist III is irreproachably great. In places, it's also quite stupid: almost the first thing that happens is a crucifix sculpture of Jesus opens its eyes as evil tries to break into a church, like one of those dolls with weighted eyes that move if you stand it up. But when he gives up the talky shit and actually attempts to make an atmospheric horror-drama hybrid (for it never remotely jumps into horror theatrics without couching it in character business and theme, two things that I don't believe Blatty is as good at writing as he plainly believes), it is genuinely chilling and unnerving - its absolute best scary moments are creepier than anything in The Exorcist itself, in fact, particularly when the terrible sound mixing is turned to the film's advantage and makes the demon seem like something not quite in reality.

Above and beyond anything else, as horror, as theology, or as a character study, the film has George C. Scott and Brad Dourif, whose scenes together are nothing less than exquisite. Scott is good in the whole film, mind you, but the scenes he shares with the demonic psychopath are on a completely different level: even the choppy editing settles down into languid two-shots and fascination with Dourif's horrifyingly intense monologues. It is the one point where the movie effortlessly achieves the sense of soul-sickness that it otherwise has to fight for and only rarely attains; the one place where the stated exploration of evil on a spiritual and physical level rises above the talky philosophisin' and becomes real, tangible, and genuinely upsetting. It's not a huge amount to build a movie on, but it's absolutely brilliant stuff, and nothing else in The Exorcist III is remotely bad enough to rob it of its pitch-black power.

Reviews in this series
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)
The Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)
The Exorcist Prequels:
-Exorcist: The Beginning (Harlin, 2004)
-Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (Schrader, 2005)

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