Review by Kit Rathenar
It’s not often I watch a film that’s genuinely so terrible that I don’t know where to start laying into it first, but The Vatican Exorcisms is one of the few to earn this dubious accolade. If the team responsible for this trainwreck were hoping to discredit the Catholic Church, bad luck – they’ve mostly succeeded only in discrediting themselves. This is a film so bad I can’t believe I sat through it.
On the purely technical side, while I’m aware that the found-footage mockumentary format frees directors from the obligations of actually knowing how to make a decent film, it’s amazing how often you find ones that seem to have been made by someone who’s never watched a documentary in their life either. The Vatican Exorcisms is one such. Irrelevant content, ham-fisted cuts, and grammatically incorrect bumper text are proudly showcased throughout. The camerawork alone would make any BBC professional weep into his mug of tea, being in obligatory seasick-o-vision because fictional documentary crews aren’t allowed tripods or Steadicam. The sound boom takes centre stage at critical moments, nobody can manage to check their monitor and be sure that the camera is pointing the right way, and up-the-nose angles abound (after all, when filming oneself alone in a hotel room, the approved method is to hold the camera in the manner of someone taking a Tumblr selfie, rather than, eg, setting it up on the nightstand – right?)
Plotwise, meanwhile, this is supposedly an investigation/expose into either Satanic corruption in the Vatican, or the practice of exorcism itself – it’s not clear which, as the first twenty minutes focus on the former, only for this line of inquiry to be then completely dropped in favour of pure exorcism footage that never once challenges the veracity or probity of the priest involved. What it does call into question is his competence, as out of four exorcisms shown, none of them appear to be successful and some of them only make the situation worse. When you consider that Christ explicitly granted his followers the authority to cast out devils in his name, you have to wonder how they’ve gotten so bad at it.
But of course, this isn’t actually a film about the realities of possession and exorcism, let alone about the secret politics or policies of the Vatican. This is simply a quick slap-together of religious horror cliches; and despite an opening disclaimer warning of “shocking” viewing, most of what should have been the money shots of said cliches happen offscreen into the bargain. Footage of a “black mass” shows us nothing but scores of candles laid out in a severely cockeyed pentagram, a burning cross, and a couple of unconscious women being hauled around, before culminating in the film crew being chased out of a graveyard by what look like a bunch of Ku Klux Klan extras. A possessed nun sits and… does absolutely nothing for an entire day, to such a degree that I was peering at the screen trying to work out whether she was a real human being or some sort of prop rubber nun (and not in the fetish sense, either, though admittedly that would have made this film way more entertaining). And as soon as something starts to happen, of course, the officiating priest predictably throws everyone out of the room.
The only part of this film that genuinely impressed me was the last of the exorcism sequences, and that was purely down to the dramatic performances turned in by the priest and possessee involved. Watching a man supposedly possessed by demons run circles around a church rotunda while being fulminated at by a bearded priest wielding an aspergillum like it was a holy sword almost, for a moment, made this movie worth sitting through. However, that was definitely only almost. In short, the only thing truly diabolical about The Vatican Exorcisms is the fact that it ever got distribution. Avoid this film at any cost.
The Vatican Exorcisms is out now on Region 2 DVD, from Metrodome.