Florin Scanlon’s review published on Letterboxd:
Part of Hooptober X
The found footage sub-genre produced some of the best and worst movies the horror medium has to offer. It's still a relatively new form and there's still a huge untapped potential to mine considering that nowadays there's a camera at every corner, on every desk and in every pocket. It's incredibly effective when done right but it can be incredibly lousy when done wrong. On top of that, we now live in an age where the documentary style employed by the sub-genre has been parodied to death by the likes of What We Do in the Shadows (the movie & series) to the point where it's hard not to smirk every time we see a crash zoom done with the genuine intent to unsettle or frighten. So when talking about The Last Exorcism, it's almost as if the film-makers had a prescient insight to include humor to the mix, just so late-comers like me would be able to enjoy it despite some of its ridiculousness.
Indeed, for the first third the movie is a comedy and a good one at that, taking a cue or two from The Office. We are introduced to Reverend Cotton Marcus (a brilliant Patrick Fabian) as he is followed by a small crew of two documentary film-makers in his day-to-day activities as a man of the cloth. Marcus is a charismatic showman who uses the church as his stage and the churchgoers as his audience, spreading healing of the soul through performance and emotional manipulation rather than a deep belief in the word of God. As he views it, he gives people what they need and if he can do it while jokingly inserting banana bread recipes in his sermons and slyly winking at the camera, all the better and no harm done. But as he discovered from reports of exorcisms gone wrong, harm can be done even when performing, which is why he sets out to unmask this practice for the scam that it really is and put an end to it once and for all with the help of the documentary crew.
Alas, after getting on camera one last revealingly (and hilariously executed) fake exorcism to end all exorcisms, things get more complicated, in typical horror fashion. What follows for the next two thirds is a more serious attempt to scare and horrify, resorting to every trick in the possession and found footage books, including the aforementioned use of the crash zoom. And in typical found footage fashion, there is the obligatory moment where a character keeps filming when the moment clearly calls for putting the camera down. But even if the movie takes a turn for the worse, it provides enough shifts to keep things interesting and it does it in such an exaggerated way that it kind of becomes enjoyable again. Ashley Bell plays the possessed girl with a whimsical and frenzied energy that allows for a more tongue-in-cheek read and Louis Herthum as the father brings the stoicism and the blue eyes to sell the unintentional-or-is-it-intentional humor. All in all, a mixed bag as they say, but with plenty to appreciate and a memorable, bonkers ending.
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