"The Last Exorcism" meets The Tentative Apologist

My wife and I just got back from a romantic Sunday matinee showing of “The Last Exorcism”. For those unfamiliar with this new film, it adopts the popular faux documentary style by supposedly consisting of footage filmed for a documentary about a preacher named Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian).

 About the mockumentary style, it can be very effective as in “Blair Witch” and the Spanish film “Rec”. But choosing this angle is a trade-off. In order to get the raw authenticity you need to give up the spit and polish of a real produced film, including multiple camera angles, finely spliced editing, and an appropriately eerie soundtrack.

Sadly, it appears that “Last Exorcism” is not sure it wants to go all the way. I’ll give a couple examples. First, although all the footage is supposedly filmed by one camera, there are a number of scenes that make this highly implausible, even impossible. For instance, in one intense scene the camera cuts from the possessed girl to a 2 second shot of a gun being cocked (how did the camera man know the gun would be cocked right then?), to the terrified preacher. For the more geeky film viewer, this kind of inconsistency becomes a distraction.

Second, the film is apparently not confident enough that the footage can set the mood and so it finds recourse at a number of points to a “scary music” audio track. To my mind, that’s like including a laugh track in a Woody Allen film. All this leaves the viewer to wonder who edited all this supposedly raw footage into a polished film?

(By contrast, last year’s “Paranormal Activity” was diligent about remaining within the strictures of the mockumentary right down to the absence of credits at the beginning in favor of a thanks to the San Diego Police Department for releasing the footage.)

The premise of “Last Exorcism” is strikingly reminiscent of the (real) 1972 documentary “Marjoe” about child evangelist Marjoe Gortner who, having grown up and left the church, invites a camera crew along for one last revivalist tour to expose the chicanery of charismatic preachers. In the case of “Last Exorcism” Marcus’ aims in inviting the crew along is to expose the fake exorcisms that he (and presumably others) have been doing for years.

Interestingly, Marcus explains that he suffered a loss of faith after it was medical science, not God, that saved his young son. This crisis of faith angle was very interesting.

“Marjoe” memorably exposed the way that charismatic preachers fleece their flocks through various psychological techniques in the pulpit. Marcus does something similar as he humorously drops a recipe for banana bread into a sermon, to the amens of his oblivious, frenetic congregation.

But this film isn’t ultimately about crooked preachers; it’s about crooked exorcists. Marcus intends to take the camera crew (a camera man and a sound woman) to his final exorcism on the Sweetzer farm in rural Louisiana. It turns out that Louis Sweetzer is losing livestock on a nightly basis, apparently at the hand of his daughter Nell (played convincingly by Ashley Bell), an overactive somnambulist who has the ability to disembowel two thousand pound cattle without interrupting her REM sleep.

So Marcus and the crew drive out to the Sweetzer farm (with a good, suspenseful buildup) and over the next half hour or so (of film time) he undertakes his perfunctory exorcism, while demonstrating his props and techniques of his crooked craft to the camera crew. Marcus then takes his payment from a relieved Louis Sweetzer and retires to a nearby motel. And that’s when things begin to get interesting…

The real tragedy of “Last Exorcism” is that the film completely falls apart in the last ten minutes. I couldn’t decide whether to call it hokey or corny so I’ll just settle for lame. The ending reminded me of The Simpsons episode “Homer the Great” when Homer joins a secret society called The Stonecutters (although The Simpsons is funnier). But a closer parallel is probably the ending of “Rosemary’s Baby” when poor Rosemary discovers that her wicked neonate is being worshipped by a witches coven. (To my mind “Rosemary’s Baby” is probably the most overrated supernatural horror film ever.)

Anyway, “Last Exorcism” is worth it if you can forgive the ridiculously overblown last ten minutes. The film has a few genuine scares and, like “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” (and the superior German film “Requiem”) lots of amperage for theological and philosophical reflection so you need not excuse a visit to the theatre as a mere guilty pleasure.