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Employing the same type of "found footage" gimmick made popular by The Blair Witch Project over a decade ago, The Last Exorcism aspires to do for exorcist movies what Paranormal Activity did for haunted house movies. The film's plot is unremarkable, but an effective, authentic-feeling found footage approach could've allowed The Last Exorcism to stand as an excellent genre pic and the first genuinely terrifying exorcism-related movie since The Exorcist back in 1973. Unfortunately, the finished product is a far cry from what it should have been. A common complaint of found footage movies is that they're boring, and The Last Exorcism is guilty of this cardinal sin to an unforgivable extent, with leaden direction and a constant feeling of artificiality.
Southern preacher Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) comes from a long line of ministers but is nevertheless confronted with a crisis of faith, and he maintains that exorcisms are a sham, merely serving as a placebo cure for mentally ill persons. To prove that exorcisms and demons are bogus, he invites a couple of documentarians to join him as he travels to Louisiana to perform what he intends to be his final exorcism. The supposedly possessed individual is a virginal teenage girl, Nell (Ashley Bell), whose anxious father, Louis (Louis Herthum), believes that she slaughters livestock at night under the control of a demon. To provide the family peace of mind, Cotton performs his fraudulent exorcism routine on Nell and prepares to head home. Unfortunately, it seems that Nell might not be free of the demons, and what begins as a mission to prove the nonexistence of demons turns into something more sinister and unholy.
Any found footage movie sets out to achieve a sense of realism and authenticity, or else it just looks like a lousily-filmed student movie using a gimmick to excuse glaring flaws. Alas, The Last Exorcism feels too staged. It even draws attention to its artificiality by blatantly cheating - music is present to underscore "scares", there are too many convenient transition shots, and the cast even contains established actors. Most critically, there is supposed to be only one cameraman, but several sequences are edited in a way that'd be impossible to achieve without multiple camera set-ups or several takes. It's clear that director Daniel Stamm wanted to deploy filmmaking techniques forbidden by the found footage approach, resulting in a picture that lacks the documentary essence it relied on to prevent it from feeling like a cheap Exorcist knock-off. Further compounding these faults are scenes in which it seems ridiculous for the cameraman to keep filming. Not to mention, an actual camera operator would not be so liberal with zooms - indeed, the zooms are so constant and unnecessary that they quickly become an annoyance. Stamm's efforts may be enough for some viewers, but anyone who thinks too deeply about the filmmaking techniques will see The Last Exorcism for the muddled attempt at realism that it is.
However, The Last Exorcism does have its positives, with strong performances from an eminently watchable Patrick Fabian as Cotton and a highly effective Ashley Bell as Nell. There's also a sharp sense of satire permeating several scenes (Cotton's staged exorcism on Nell is especially hilarious), and the film has a few interesting comments to make about religion, faith, and Christianity. However, the film has enormous pacing issues - the first hour is devoid of anything approaching scares, leading to a disheartening lack of tension exasperated by the uninspired script and drab mise-en-scène. Worst of all, the film tries to force the possibility that Nell is mentally unstable, but the filmmakers are not interested in following through with this potentially interesting angle. Instead, The Last Exorcism ends with a complete dud of a finale (with cartoonish CGI) that takes the easy way out and was clearly made for cheap thrills, not the kind of thrills we came here wanting to see. It's a thoroughly moronic way to close the feature, proving that a terrible ending can affect a movie's quality as a whole.
Perhaps the worst thing about The Last Exorcism is that it has zero replay value. Once you know how the movie ends, you will not want to take the journey again. The film is pretty boring the first time around, but it's a borderline agonising bore when you watch it again with knowledge of how it ends. The brilliance of films like [Rec] and Paranormal Activity is that they sold their documentary conceit extremely well and were engaging and well-written. The Last Exorcism doesn't follow the same rules and is marred by the generally dull filmmaking all around. It has a few nice moments, but they are few and far between. You'd be better off watching free exorcism videos on YouTube than enduring this sluggish missed opportunity.
3.9/10
