FILM CHALLENGE: 115) The Last Exorcism

115) The Last Exorcism

Director: Daniel Stamm

Year: 2010

Plot Summary: Reverend Marcus visits the Sweetzers farm where he plans to film a documentary of what he hopes to be his final exorcism. However, all of his past experience does not begin to prepare him for the terror that lays within.

After the monumental success of Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project, it seems that everyone interested in making a horror movie has jumped on the faux documentary band-waggon. However, while the aforementioned titles used this style in an interesting way to produce frights and chills that were unexpected, unique and were backed up by interesting concepts, The Last Exorcism, frankly, just doesn't work.

At first, Eli Roth's production feels like a satirical mockumentary about an evangelical preacher. Despite the fact that both the name and marketing builds it up to be a horror, you're immediately thrown into something that more closely resembles This Is Spinal Tap. Sure, while these opening 20 minutes are fairly entertaining, they're sure to completely alienate the audience who are going in with the expectations of jumps, shocks and terror.

After this, the film slowly starts to take itself more seriously as the documentary crew enter the house of a possessed girl that the preacher is going to perform an exorcism on. However, when I say 'slowly', I mean it takes a good hour before anything remotely haunting happens. If the story was absorbing this would be forgivable, but The Last Exorcism's narrative is nothing fascinating in the slightest and, therefore, it's critical that it has at least some terror to maintain your involvement. The only thing engrossing about it is awaiting the thrills, but they take a good 60 minutes to come. Furthermore, when they finally come in the final act, you can see them from a mile off.

The horror genre is one that certainly has potential and, occasionally, someone will come along and make a terrific job of it. For example, Roman Polanski when he made Rosemary's Baby, Stanley Kubrick when he made The Shining or Ridley Scott when he made Alien. But, unfortunately, there are so many productions that rely simply on cheap thrills at the cost of a good narrative, interesting ideas and anything unique to say. This is one of them... Just without the thrills.

2/5

By Daniel Sarath with No comments