The Last Exorcist (2020) Review
The Last Exorcist (2020) Review
After every priest trained in exorcisms die in a terrorist attack, Josephine Campbell (Rachele Brooke Smith) must battle a demon from her past that, this time, possesses her sister.
Friedkin’s 1973 classic THE EXORCIST covered demonic possession so well that there wasn’t really a need for anyone else to cover the same ground again. Over the years a number of filmmakers have tried to do just that, only to end up with, at best, pale imitations of the afore-mentioned classic. THE EXORCIST is so indelibly etched into popular culture that any filmmaker looking to tread the same ground really needs to bring something new to the table and, to begin with, it was looking like writer/director Robin Bain was on track to give us the same old tired possession shtick – just two minutes in and we already have a priest shouting ‘The Power of Christ compels you’, yep, nothing new so far!
THE LAST EXORCIST is variably acted, has far too many flashbacks/waking from bad dream sequences and is basically a bit of a mess, all of which doesn’t really bode well for its chances to stack up as your evening’s entertainment of choice but get this, it works, albeit for all the wrong reasons. Also it also brings something new to a tired sub-genre, for example, did you know that if you’re in league with evil that you have a disposition to consume a lot of alcohol, party hard and deliberately bump into people as you walk? No, I didn’t either. I guess that mean that most of the people in Bournemouth, where I live, are in allegiance with Beelzebub too as that’s exactly how they behave on a regular basis.
I also learned that someone experiencing epileptic seizures could actually be fighting off evil spirits trying to enter their body, that dead priests do the full ‘Obi Wan-Kenobi’ routine of appearing in a shimmering light or imparting advice from the after-life, and that no one at all will notice when someone spontaneously combusts at a quietly crowded outdoor event, and if they did notice then they just decided to do nothing about it except move on with their life as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened right in front of their eyes.
What I would have liked to have seen was how Maddie (Terri Ivans) was before the possession and how she interacted with other people, especially her sister. This would have helped me see how radically the possession had changed her, for all I know she might have always been an alcoholic who rubbed people up the wrong way. As for the film’s main man – Danny Trejo – he’s there for just a couple of minutes early on in the film before making his presence known for the climactic exorcism scene. So to summarise THE LAST EXORCIST is a bit of a mess, but it’s a fun mess, even if unintentionally, and it certainly put a smile on my face, and given the sorry state of the world at large currently, smiles are hard to come by.
