Review of The Last Exorcism (2010) by Dorothy B — 15 Jul 2012

I've always had a soft spot for exorcism movies. Sure, they've been overdone and a lot of them have sucked. However, The Last Exorcism looked like it would be entertaining and it was for the most part.

Reverend Cotton Marcus is a man who claims to be a loyal man of God, yet he believes in taking advantage of people's fears when it comes to possession and demonic activity. When he gets a call about a girl said to be possessed by a demon and he takes his crew to document the whole thing and try to disprove the idea of demonic possession.

The film is presented in found footage format and it worked to the film's advantage. It gave a believable sense of all the creepy stuff involving the girl that's possessed. I actually felt like I was watching recovered footage of a possession gone wrong.

The acting in the film is also good. Nothing special from most of the cast, but the girl that's possessed is downright creepy. When she's not possessed, she's a normal girl who's likable enough to be able to want to see her survive the ordeal.

However, during the possession scenes she does some messed up stuff. One of those things involve beating a cat to death with the camera being used to film. If you're a big animal lover, you might be disturbed by the scene, especially because after the beating, you can catch a brief glimpse of the cat's body and it's just a bloody mess.

The girl also says a lot of obscene stuff that really pushed the boundaries of what can be in a PG-13 movie. I also really liked the idea of the reverend thinking of demonic possession is also just a bunch of crap and he's out to show the world it's all in our mind.

I think the film would've lost my attention if it was just some generic preacher who takes religion too seriously. You know, the guys who are all like "No,no! Electronics are an abomination against God and are of the Devil!" The film had a lot of good stuff going for it, the realism, creepiness, the atmosphere, but then the ending happened.

The ending of this movie is comeplete shit. The ending doesn't really answer anything going on in the movie, it just leaves the question "Are you seriously gonna end the movie like this? Dude, what the hell just happened?" I went from enjoying the movie, to having some harsh feelings to how it all built up to a complete failure of an end.

The Last Exorcism had really good potential to be a memorable exorcism movie, but it just left me with a feeling of disappointment and emptiness.