Mock-doc horror format has worn out its welcome

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Ashley Bell gives good Linda Blair as a possessed Lousiana farm girl. (LIONSGATE)

Of all film genres, the horror movie is the one that suffers least from lack of a budget. With decent acting, a modicum of special effects, and an imaginative script, film history shows you don't need an expensive movie star or a big budget to elicit thrills and win audiences.

The Last Exorcism benefits from that fact. It knowingly utilizes the gimmick of an as-it-happens documentary (see also: The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity) to save money on production values and give its premise an underlay of creepy credibility.

Then it blows it.

The subject of the doc is Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), a second-generation preacher who, he confesses, is losing his faith. In fact, he only agrees to having a documentary crew follow him on one of his exorcism gigs as a means of kissing the con act goodbye while revealing the secrets of the scam.

His last assignment takes him to the Sweetzer farm in a desolate Louisiana backwater, where a desperate fundamentalist father Louis (Louis Hertham) worries that his virginal 16-year-old daughter Nell (Ashley Bell) has been making nightly forays into the barn to slaughter cattle while possessed.

Overcoming the hostility of Nell's bristling brother Caleb (Caleb Landry Jones), Cotton goes through the motions of an exorcism using practised fakery, including a crucifix that emits a puff of smoke at just the right moment, all captured by a two-person film crew.

But it's not over. Circumstances conspire to keep the trio from leaving, including the realization that Nell may be a victim of some kind of sexual abuse. While he makes a living from the art of the con, innate decency keeps Cotton from taking the money and running.

The script by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland sets up some interesting moral dilemmas along these lines and director Daniel Stamm coolly guides his actors to make maximum impact by keeping the performances natural and free of any heavy-handed emoting. (In the roles of the siblings, Bell and Jones are especially strong.)

And it all works well enough at first. But their efforts to keep the film grounded in documentary realism grows tiresome and the film's hard-won credibility starts to fall apart as it the plot gets more bizarre.

Last year's Paranormal Activity was a far more successful at generating tension precisely because they kept it simple, slowly building tension and paying off with a potent wallop in the last couple of minutes. The Last Exorcism has the potential to match that impact but stumbles.

This movie signals that it's probably time to stow the pseudo-documentary gimmick and go back to a more classic narrative.

After all, the first and best of the exorcism movies, The Exorcist, was not some stylized Hollywood chiller. Its director William Friedkin actually employed the same kind of gritty, no-frills technique he employed on The French Connection to ground the fantastic story in a terrifying reality.

No documentary film crew required.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Other voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of The Last Exorcism.

Demons and rednecks form a terrifying tag-team in this creepy Exorcist/Blair Witch Project mash-up.

--Thomas Leupp, Hollywood.com

The more hellish the story gets, the sillier and less involving the movie becomes.

-- Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald

It's about the dark side of piety -- the cultish wrath that can emerge out of the high and the mighty. At the centre of it all, once again, is a teenage girl's gnashing wrath.

-- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

Self-possessed performances elevate this creepy but half-cocked faux-doc.

-- Michael Rechtshaffen, Hollywood Reporter

Compiled by Shane Minkin

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 27, 2010 D5