Review by Quin
Exorcism ends with a confession that is both well written and well performed. I’m not offering up some great spoiler. Like most found footage films, you know ahead of time what is in store for the characters. In fact, if you’ve seen any two, you can probably pick out the similarities and those plot points would be present in any other two found footage films you may choose at random – this film included. Where Exorcism fails completely is in its construction. The story is there, the acting is good enough, and it has all of the footage it needs for a complete story (even at barely 60 minutes in length) – but the editing is some of the worst I’ve seen in the last couple years. However, the film’s biggest offense is its overuse of fast moving expository intertitles and bad fonts. Throughout the film, the viewer’s hand is held, via black screens with text carefully explaining things you already know, things you can figure out for yourself, or things no one could possibly know. To make things worse – the writing is sloppy, words are misspelled and grammar is horrendous. Don’t worry, I’ll give some examples. But, I can not stress enough – a film should show you what you need to know. Writer/director Lance Patrick may want to consider a career in writing dialogue for comic books; either that or he should find a time machine and go back to the early 1920s and make movies there.
The plot of the film is simple, but please allow me to summarize and extrapolate for you. A group of young filmmakers (cast and crew) are headed to a house in the middle of nowhere. In all honesty, we can only assume this because they drive forever and then walk a little further in the dark – their destination is an old house that was the site of an exorcism 50 years prior. These people are there, illegally, to use the location to film their own re-creation of the exorcism. Throw in a curse from a disgruntled acquaintance and whatever residual haunting the house may have and crazy, bad things start happening on camera and in the audio.
Extremely straightforward and a bit run-of-the-mill found footage horror as far as the story goes; unfortunately the editing of the film pretty much dismantles all tension and makes the story more confusing and more repetitive than it needs to be. I already mentioned the text – which serves the same purpose as a guy sitting next to you in a theatre, nudging you ever few seconds and saying, “Did you see that? Huh? Did ya?” For instance, when we meet the character who sets the curse in motion, it’s preceded with a title card that says, “The envious one…” We should be able to figure that out by watching her actions, and facial expressions, not to mention her chanting something that sounds a whole lot like a curse. And then there’s the overuse of ellipses, and they aren’t even used correctly, but…
I know that every other young filmmaker since 1994 has wanted to be Quentin Tarantino, but structuring your film in a non-linear way takes skill and finesse. This film is jarring, bordering on incoherent at times and at best it just makes the viewer laugh at how silly it all is. The film hadn’t been going for 20 minutes yet and we had already jumped back to three days earlier, a few days later on the set, back at the party, two days later, 17 minutes later… oh, you get the idea. It’s totally insane, actually. Toward the end it gets oddly specific, “Exactly 11 minutes and 6 seconds later…” There are those ellipses again, maybe those are an evil spirit as well. A movie about the evil ellipses would actually be so much better than exorcism.
All they really have to do to make Exorcism decent is remove all of the exposition after the initial brief and edited explanation, and re-order the scenes so the beginning of the final scene comes first; and separate the pre-trip scenes and filming on location scenes, because the climax of the film is actually pretty strong. No matter how you slice it up, this film is never going to win any awards, but I’m sure it could make some horror fans happy. As it stands right now, I would advise everyone to look the other way and see anything else before this one. Hopefully these people will listen to some criticism and try again. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day we’re all talking about how much Lance Patrick’s films have improved. But for now, Exorcism should be credited to Alan Smithee, which is a Director’s Guild of America thing – does the UK have anything like that? (Editor’s note – yes Quin, we know who Alan Smithee is, or rather isn’t.)
Exorcism is out now on Region 2 DVD from 101 Films.