The Last Exorcism Review

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 08.30.2010

The found footage genre bares its infernal soul once again...

Directed by: Daniel Stamm
Written by: Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland

Starring:
Patrick Fabian - Cotton Marcus
Ashley Bell - Nell Sweetzer
Louis Herthum - Louis Sweetzer
Iris Bahr - Iris
Caleb Landry Jones - Caleb Sweetzer
Shanna Forrestall - Mrs. Cotton Marcus
Tony Bentley - Pastor Manley



Running Time: 87 minutes
Rated PG-13 for disturbing violent content and terror, some sexual references and thematic material.

Found footage mockumentaries are all the rage in Hollywood horror, and have been for quite some time. The subgenre's appeal is obvious to studios and filmmakers; it is a very inexpensive way to make a horror film and allows the films to feel real, which in theory adds to the audience's tension. From The Blair Witch Project, Altered and Quarantine to Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead and Paranormal Activity the concept has produced some very good and extremely poor films during its run over the last eleven years. The films always manage to be profitable thanks to ingenious marketing and low overhead, which means that we haven't seen the last of them by any stretch. The latest of those films is one that tackles the Hollywood horror staple of exorcisms. Directed by Daniel Stamm and featuring Hostel director Eli Roth as a producer, The Last Exorcism hit theaters this weekend hoping to take advantage of a relatively horror-free market at the moment.

The film, shot in the faux documentary style, focuses on Reverend Cotton Marcus (Fabian), an evangelical minister who, having been raised as a preacher from an early age, is now disillusioned from his faith yet still practices because it is all he knows. He's all about the show as opposed to the purpose; at one point, he tells the documentary crew, "I could preach to them my grandmother's banana bread recipe" and proceeds to do exactly that. However, he's not a complete villain; having seen the sometimes horrific results of exorcisms, he wants to put an end to what he considers a barbaric practice. In order to prove exorcism is a sham, he invites a camera crew to accompany him on one of his jobs. He travels with them to rural Louisiana where he meets Louis Sweetzer (Herthum). Louis's wife died of cancer and the death turned him to religion. His son Caleb (Jones) is not a fan of the sudden shift to extreme fundamentalism, but his daughter Nell (Bell) is the one who he thinks needs help. Louis blames her for cattle mutilations and thinks the devil has gotten into her.

Cotton clearly doesn't believe that Nell is possessed, but he does, in some way, believe that he can help her. He decides to carry out an exorcism, duped up with some rigged devices for special effects. It is only after the exorcism that things get out of the ordinary for Cotton and the camera crew, as they end up returning to the house by strange circumstances and find them in the crosshairs of what is either a very mentally disturbed young or something ancient that none of them are capable of handling.
"Found footage" films often seem like they are largely improvised, but there is always a script. Here, it is written by the duo of Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland, the team behind the documentary-style comedy Mail Order Wife and the upcoming The Virginity Hit. Mockumentary films seem to be the duo's style of choice. And to their credit, they seem very comfortable in the genre. For a while into the film, The Last Exorcism treads familiar stylistic ground but tells an original story. Exorcism stories are nothing new to horror, but relatively few of them approach the story with an exorcist who truly doesn't believe.

In fact, the establishing of Cotton's character, while it may be offensive to particularly religious people due to the rather blatant way that the reverend mocks the very religion he preaches, actually contains some very solid character-building. Sure, Cotton is a snake-oil salesman who doesn't believe in the spirituality that he's peddling anymore, but his reason for losing his faith is understandable in some degree. Exorcism has turned him against his faith because it has caused harm, and indeed the practice is still considered one of the more controversial aspects of most established churches. It is only because he heard of a fatal and misguided exorcism of a disabled boy that reminds him of his own son that Cotton is driven away from his faith and that may not be an idea that everyone likes, but people can get on board with it.

The rest of the characters are a bit less fully fleshed out. Nell and her father are given enough of a back story and character development that they seem like fully established characters; the documentarian and her camera man are kept shallow so as to be the eyes of the audience. Anyone else is presented with just enough character to make them serviceable for the roles they play in the film, but the feeling can definitely be picked up on that they didn't exactly get in-depth back stories. Not that this is a huge issue; one of the advantages of faux documentaries is that the realistic feel means that characters automatically feel more real, and the writing team take advantage of that.

To the credit of director Daniel Stamm, a very solid group of actors has been picked to portray the principle characters. Patrick Fabian is an actor best known for his character work on television, from Veronica Mars to Big Love. As Cotton, Fabian is able to project a considerable charm and the slick huckster attitude that the story requires of him, but also the humanity to make people like him in spite of his used car-salesman attitude. The other lead is Ashley Bell, who plays Nell. Bell has a real girl-next-door quality to her--not the Hollywood Girl Next Door, but someone who could very well live down the street and is pretty but real. She comes across as very sweet, but when she gets the devil's streak in her then everything twists around and her earlier innocence makes it all the more shocking. She does some physical contortions during her possession moments that is absolutely cringe-inducing and makes a case for stardom here.

Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is not quite as effective. Caleb Landry Jones is creepy with his dead-eyed stare and sullen attitude, but he comes across as fairly bland otherwise. Louis Herthum gives an uneven performance as Louis Sweetzer; sometimes he's quite good and other times he pushes overacting over the edge. Iris Bahr is attractive yet most forgettable as filmmaker Iris and the rest are pretty much unremarkable. This is likely a stylistic choice as they are supposed to be "natural" seeming, but it also means that they come off bland and that's not so much a good thing.

This film is being promoted behind the name of Eli Roth, but he serves as a producer; the man behind the lens is Daniel Stamm. Stamm's previous credit as a feature-length film maker was another mockumentary, A Necessary Death. This means that Stamm understand the genre that he's working in and to his credit, he lets the story unfold in a very natural, confident manner. This also means that for the middle portion of the film he is able to build a fair amount of tension as Cotton and his film crew realize that things are not at all what they appear to be. He uses some tricks of the found footage genre to keep this film seeming graphic without ever letting it cross into R territory; this is a PG-13 horror film with some teeth to it.

It is unfortunate, then, that Stamm has no idea what to do for the last third of the film. The story reaches a rather natural conclusion all too early and it almost seems like the writers and director knew a sixty minute feature would be too short so they tacked on a half-hour ending to get it to a theatrical length. The film comes completely off the rails in the last act and it completely undoes any potential that the movie had. It goes from creepy and effective, climaxed with a second exorcism in a barn that results in Bell's contortionist magic, to silly and over the top. The effect in moving from the subtle and effective film-making in the first two acts to the conventional, half-thought out and extremely clichéd finale is that you have almost two separate films. To say the end is an extreme letdown is a definite understatement and it leaves the audience walking away completely deflated.

The 411: The Last Exorcism is a textbook example of how a film can start off very promising and completely fall apart in very short order. Scripters Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland and director Daniel Stamm create a very engaging and solid old-school horror film that utilizes all the mockumentary background of all three men very effectively in the first two acts. The performances of the two leads are solid in Patrick Fabian as faithless minister Cotton Marcus and Ashley Bell as the possibly-possessed Nell Sweetzer. The tension builds nicely for about an hour, effective without resorting to cheap jump scares or gratuitous blood and gore. Unfortunately, the final act is goes completely off the rails and the sublime becomes silly and overblown in the extreme to the point that it seems as if a much inferior film's ending got tacked on to pad the running time. In many cases this would not completely ruin the experience, but unfortunately for The Last Exorcism this amounts to a full one-third of the film. The end result is another horror mockumentary that has a lot of promise but falls completely flat, leaving the audience deeply disappointed with another lower-tier entry into the subgenre.

Final Score:  5.0   [ Not So Good ]