Earning double points in the poor taste stakes of shameless self-promotion, straight-to-video horror mess
Exorcismus - written by
David Muñoz, a financial advisor by trade, who occasionally dabbles in film - has been sold not only on the basis that it is from Filmax, the studio behind the brilliant films, but also that it "stars"
Doug Bradley, better known to horror aficionados as Hellraiser's iconic ghoul Pinhead. That the film shares practically no DNA with either film (aside from also having a Spanish director), and that Bradley's "starring role" actually consists of a two-minute cameo near the end, is quite the indication of quite how feverishly the film's marketers had to scrape the bottom of the barrel in order to drum up some fuss about this ghastly horror pic. Socially awkward, home-schooled teenager Emma (
Sophie Vavasseur) one day begins to suffer from convulsions and act out in ways that she has no memory of. As these behaviours escalate to levels that threaten her friends and family, she comes to believe that she might be possessed by the Devil, and seeks help from her uncle Christopher (Stephen Billington), a Priest with experience in performing exorcisms. It soon becomes a race to expiate the Devil from her before it can wreak anymore havoc on those Emma is close to. Worse than an outright bad film - which, until the silly third act, it really is not - Exorcismus commits a cardinal sin of inspiring few passionate feelings whatsoever, it just traces along the undemanding schematic of the DTV horror film. What's here has mostly been lifted from better films of the sort and diluted down with some gaudy dramatic interludes from friends and family, serving little purpose other than to buff out the already slender 95-minute runtime. Exposition, meanwhile, is awkwardly handled, relying too heavily on cutting between the past and the present, and aside from star Billington - the only one with any charisma or screen presence - the performances are universally sub-par; Vavasseur is scarcely tolerable-ish, while the actors playing her best mate and especially her brother are cringe-inducingly ropey.
Horror clichés inevitably see in considerable screen time, from the cheaply-generated "scary" visions to the distinct feeling that this is all going to lead up to a forced plot twist (which it does, gracelessly). Unfortunately, the tone is too serious-minded for the film to be any fun, and even when unintentional humour eventually abounds - for I beg you to try and take the squabblings of emotionally fickle, hormonal teenage girls seriously - it is for only the most fleeting of moments. The cheap-as-chips effects are neither effective for their actual purpose nor charming in their awfulness, and no number of tension chords laid over the poorly-acted possessions and obvious levitation tricks can change that. The low production values do admittedly add a chilly banality to the exorcism - for even the would-be scary scenes take place mostly during the day - but when things finally seem to be getting interesting in the film's second-half, it turns out to be everything we've already seen before, except it's executed with less money and less skill, and is therefore less entertaining. There is no invention, little suspense, and worst of all there's no sense of fear. There's only one remotely chilling moment, and it's hampered by a bout of trite overdirection, while the third act gets sillier and sillier the closer to the end it gets, whimpering to a halt with an absurdly foreseeable twist. What can be learned from Exorcismus? When left to their own devices, financial economists don't typically make very good screenwriters.
Exorcisums is available on
DVD from today.