Review: The Last Exorcism (2010)

I wanted to believe.  Oh, how I wanted to believe.

I wanted to believe that a film could come along and single-handedly revitalize the exorcism film genre.


Sure, The Last Exorcism has Eli Roth's name attached, and I'm not a fan of most of Mr. Roth's oeuvre.  But after all, he's producing, not writing or directing.  Thus, this film couldn't be Hostel-style torture porn (which some people incorrectly often lump the Saw series in with, but I digress.)

Granted, The Last Exorcism is a "found footage" style film, a la The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, and others.  But that doesn't mean it can't be a good found footage film of a different stripe.

I was hoping that The Last Exorcism would be like an expansion on the possession scenes in another film I love, The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  That film was more courtroom drama with flashbacks, but the stills from The Last Exorcism seemed to hark back to the style of possession portrayed in TEoER.

So, upon watching The Last Exorcism, I ignored anything I had heard, any reviews I had seen, and went in with a clean frame of mind.  The following review is my attempt to be not-too spoilery.

The film starts slow, but I didn't find it too dragging.  I like a little build up.  The introduction and construction of the character of the preacher Cotton Marcus was realistic, human.  He seemed like a person you could meet in any place any day of the week.  Though the man-of-faith-questioning-said-faith plot has been done a billion times, there were just enough quirks, enough human elements, to Cotton to make him more than a cut-out.  I was worried about that since many of the characters in the film share the first names of the actors portraying them and that's never a great sign in my experience.  This time, however, it wasn't a bad thing.  The writing was generally fairly tight, with a few weak spots, as any movie might have.

The exorcism scenes were pretty standard, but then, every movie in this genre usually goes to the standard that was set by The Exorcist all those years ago.

The Last Exorcism doesn't fall apart until you think it's all over and done.  Then comes a strange, clichéd ending that harkens back to the Satanic sexual abuse witchhunts of the 1970s and 1980s and seems tacked on for a last bit of action that just doesn't deliver.

Overall, using my patented Angela-from-Sleepaway-Camp rating system, I give The Last Exorcism

 












Two screaming Angelas and one staring Angela