Horrorfest 2012: The Last Exorcism

THE LAST EXORCISM is yet another in the "found footage" genre popularized by THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. It's a horror mockumentary about an exorcist who has lost his faith and wants to take a film crew on his "last exorcism" to show just how fake everything really is.

Interestingly, this exorcist (Patrick Fabian) breaks the rules of horror movies by being Protestant instead of Catholic. He's a young family man who only kind of takes his own job as a reverend seriously and views the rural Louisiana family he's setting out to visit as the film begins as a bunch of superstitious hayseeds.

So, right away we have a couple interesting twists on old material. Putting the mockumentary style of the film aside for a moment, it's interesting to note that the skeptic in this film is also the core religious presence -- usually this genre sets up a struggle between a secular skeptic and a "wise" religious leader who knows the secrets of the spirit world. It's also interesting to note, again, that this is not an exorcist of the Catholic variety seen so often in films of this genre (whether portrayed accurately or not), but instead, the reverend of a mainstream mega-church, modern as can be, attacking the pulpit with the fire of a preacher and the savvy of a salesman.

Fabian is great in the lead, which helps with some of the creakier, less believable moments of the pseudo-documentary -- there are many chinks in the armor of "realism" where a quick viewer might think, "Wait -- if this is supposed to be a documentary, how did they...?" Ashley Bell is also great as the teenage victim of possession, believably vulnerable in her "normal" scenes and suitably creepy in her "possessed" scenes.

One of the most interesting things about this movie is that it keeps the viewer guessing for almost the entire running time as to whether or not this girl is really possessed. Since the exorcist main character doesn't even believe in his own trade, we're left wondering for much of the time whether or not this movie will end up proving the exorcist wrong or right. I don't want to give anything away, but I will say that I was pretty impressed with the movie up until the final minutes, when the story came to a solution that I felt was a little less interesting than some of the other solutions they entertained before making up their minds.

Still, THE LAST EXORCISM is better than it might sound on paper and is a little more than just a few previous classics stitched together. Not much, but a little.