Review of The Last Exorcism (2010) by Justinsmith — 25 Sep 2010

The Last Exorcism starts out with an interesting premise, but falls apart as yet another poorly rehashed mash up of The Exorcist (1973) and Rosemary's Baby (1968).

Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) is an evangelist and an exorcist, or at least he used to be. Cotton has grown tired of the hub-bub, and after the accidental death of a child at the hands of another exorcist, Cotton questions his faith and calls it quits with the exorcism game. But not before hiring a camera crew to follow him to his last exorcism, where he intends to show how it's not demons, but smoke and mirrors trickery that works on the mind of the "possessed". Responding to a plea from the reclusive and ultra-religious Sweetzer family, Cotton finds Nell (Ashley Bell), a shy and soft spoken 16-year-old girl who is supposedly possessed, her brother, Caleb (Caleb Landry Jones), who is initially less than accepting of Cotton and his crew, and their father, Louis (Louis Herthum), a widower who keeps his kids on a short leash in an effort to protect them from the evils of the outside world.

If you can get past the shaky/often out of focus cam (with camera techniques like that, I'd never hire these people to shoot a documentary), the movie has potential. Cotton's "banana bread" sermon is something to behold, as he proves just how psychological and in-the-moment his sermons really are. Once at the Sweetzer's farm all this changes, the film follows a few patterns we're familiar with, however, approaching it from the point of a faux-documentary presents new challenges and opportunities, the greatest of which is overcome when the possessed Nell gets the camera while Cotton and his crew sleeps. It's easily the best scene in the film.

Ashley Bell's ability to contort herself and flash a genuinely creepy grin, add to the natural no-special-effects-needed creepiness of the film. While Patrick Fabian is fun to ride along with as Cotton Marcus since he's simultaneously working to help Nell and expose exorcism for what he claims it really is, a hoax.

Nearly every reviewer has commented on the poor ending, and I have to agree that while the film is okay throughout, it suffers from "second ending syndrome" where the filmmakers couldn't leave well enough alone and had to add one final plot twist. This happens in far too many films and borderlines on deus ex machina (which perhaps only screenwriter Charlie Kaufman can pull off). A similar fate befell The House of the Devil (2009), which suffered from its pacing and lack of content, but had a great ending, that is, before "second ending syndrome" got the best of the filmmakers, and completely destroyed it.

Replacing the overly shaky/out of focus camera style, cutting, and promptly burning, the ending, and punching up the script, could make The Last Exorcism worth viewing. But as it stands now, instead of wasting time and money on these mashed up rehashes of classic works of cinema, go directly to the source, and seek out the classics upon which they are birthed.