Heave Media

It’s no secret that PG-13 genre films are, most of the time, not very strong. This isn’t an argument born out of some “needs more tits and blood” ideal, but simply that horror by its very nature is hard to execute in a toned-down format. This said, sometimes you’ll find a gem or two (Drag Me to Hell, The Ring), but sometimes, you get The Last Exorcism. Strangely, though, it’s not the rating that ruins the film, but a hideous final twist so half-assed it’s hard to believe that Lionsgate agreed to release Exorcism in its present state.

Sadly, until about twenty minutes from the end, the film greatly exceeds expectations. Patrick Fabian singlehandedly makes the film as Rev. Cotton Marcus, an evangelical preacher who’s short on faith but long on ways to hustle his congregation. The film is framed as a documentary following Marcus as he sets out to prove that exorcisms are the church equivalent of vials of snake oil. He picks at random from a pile of letters imploring him to perform exorcisms, and settles on a request from a man named Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum), who claims that his daughter Nell (Ashley Bell) is possessed by a demon and murdering his livestock.

Once Marcus and his crew reach the Sweetzer farm, it’s quickly apparent that things are not right. It doesn’t help that Nell’s brother Caleb (Caleb Landry Jones) doesn’t want Marcus there, and in fact openly threatens him on arrival, in one of the film’s most unnerving scenes. Nell seems perfectly sweet and adorable, but Louis seems less so; Nell’s mother passed away some years earlier, which caused tension in the household, and Louis pulled Nell from school to home-school her. There’s as much development of human tension as there is supernatural in the film’s first hour, for when Nell has her first possession fit in front of Marcus and his crew, she ends up hospitalized, leading to a revelation far more unnerving than anything involving a demon could be.

Marcus doesn’t take things seriously, and even goes so far as to dig into his bag of theatrics during the “exorcism,” but everything goes to, well, you know; HEAVEmedia is a no-pun zone as long as I have a say. The film’s sharpest play lies with Marcus, who doesn’t believe the supernatural is involved even when some seriously crazy things begin to happen. Unfortunately, it’s the skepticism angle that leads The Last Exorcism to the gallows. Somewhere in the process of writing the film, Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland decided that their demonic possession movie didn’t involve nearly enough Victorian-era female hysteria, so the domestic drama at the center of the story gets a little bit hokey.

That’s nothing compared to the suicidal coup-de-grace they pull in the last ten minutes, which not only shatters a major rule of the POV-camera narrative, but turns The Last Exorcism into an entirely different kind of horror film, and not really a good one. The trouble with such a twist, purely excluding any discussion of how tonally jarring it is, is that it completely cheats the audience. Rather than being able to consider the rest of the film when leaving the theater, a film that’s quite good, audiences will leave bickering over the ham-handed twist, and will likely end up concluding that the movie wasn’t good when they realize exactly how many levels there are on which the finale makes no sense. What a waste of an excellent premise and a talented cast.

2/4 stars