YNTE Horror Night is back! I just bought a Blu Ray player and went to a redbox to rent a BluRay disc to test the player with. I got this movie, knowing absolutely nothing about it other than the title.
As always, tons of spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned!
I’m not going to bury the lead – this movie was not very good.
This movie is filmed in the style of the Blair Witch Project, as though it is a documentary. Unfortunately, it fails to pull off the same effect for two reasons:
- The Blair Witch Project claimed to be REAL. From the top, this movie makes no such claim.
- The Last Exorcism does not commit to the form. The main characters are a Pastor, his sound lady/producer and a camera man. But you can hear what the pastor is saying, even when the sound lady does not have him mic’ed up. There are conversations between two people, shot from two different angles and edited together, even though there is only one cameraman. The footage you see could not possibly be produced by the film crew supposedly producing it.
And yes, all films are fake. But most films you can sort of turn off your brain and live in that world. This one keeps yanking you out of it by reminding you that this is fake – and poorly done fake.
But to the story:
The story follows a pastor named Cotton (named after Cotton Weary perhaps?) who has been performing fake exorcisms his whole life. The idea is basically that a person who believes that they have been possessed by a demon will see him perform what appears to be a standard exorcism, but is really just a series of parlor tricks. Believing then that they have been cured, they are, since the demon was only in their mind the whole time.
Believing that these fraudulent exorcisms do more harm than good, Cotton sets out to make a documentary of him doing one last fake exorcism to expose the practice to the masses.
At this point, everybody can predict the rest of the movie. Say it with me: The girl is actually possessed by a demon, and the fraudulent exorcist will have to perform a real exorcism.
The problem is, creepy demon girl doesn’t really start doing her thing until about an hour into the movie. There’s a lot of padding. Also there’s some discussion of incest and rape, SO THAT’S PLEASANT.
The creepy girl also makes drawings of all the main characters dying horrible deaths. Say it with me: they all die in exactly that way before the movie ends.
All in all, there was maybe 10 minutes of decent film sandwiched in 80 minutes of predictable filler. But it looked GREAT on my new BluRay player, so it wasn’t a total loss.
Catch up on past installments:
Friday the 13th (1980)
Scream 4
Scream 3
Freddy Vs. Jason
Scream 2
Scream
Red State
April Fool’s Day (1986)
Leprechaun
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Valentine
Jason X
Jason Goes to Hell – The Final Friday
Friday the 13th Part VII: Jason Takes Manhattan
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