The Conjuring (2013)

I know some people like this movie for some reason, so allow me to express my opinion of it in the most balanced, well-reasoned and fair way possible.

It fucking sucks ass! Why would anyone like this cancer-boil on the face of horror? It’s the same thing as every other unoriginal Exorcist-wannabe horror movie released since fucking Emily Rose and there is nothing – I repeat, N-O-T-H-I-N-G – original about it at all! Not to mention it’s boring as hell and incredibly poorly written – like, first-year-college drama students wouldn’t even pen something this dross. I don’t even think there’s a scary moment to be found. Fuck it!

Ahem. Okay. Now that’s out of my system and we can move on with the review.

Director: James Wan

Starring: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Lili Taylor

IMDb

The Conjuring is the latest in a series of modernized horror movies made by James Wan. Wan got really famous back in the day for directing Saw, but then he went on to completely destroy that potential by directing Dead Silence. He made a good move by going with the mega-hit Insidious a few years later, but after that he seems to have decided “fuck it,” and just went back to doing complete shit like Insidious 2 and this movie. The Conjuring is a film that seems to forget there’s anything else you can possibly do with a movie besides rip off Poltergeist and The Exorcist. That’s really about it. Let’s take a look.

We kick off with a bunch of kids talking to the dad from Insidious and the mom from Orphan – a totally credible pair of characters, if you remember anything about their original movies. I’d trust them to exorcise my house about as much as I’d trust Dr. Kevorkian to treat cancer patients who have billion-dollar trust funds somewhere.

He kills old ladies and she slaps little girls in hospitals, I sure trust them any day to deal with my supernatural problems. Added bonus for the fact that Insidious Dad had ghosts following him around most of his life and ended up putting his whole family in danger more than once. Sounds trustworthy to me!

Apparently these two are paranormal researchers. The kids talking to them feed them some dumb story about how they let an evil ghost haunt their doll. Then when it started being, well, evil, they threw it out, but it kept on coming back. This whole thing is really just a Goosebumps story. Night of the Living Dummy? And this is supposed to be a serious modern horror movie. Get the fuck out.

WHAT? I can't believe bad stuff happened when we let an evil spirit live in our creepy ass doll! Yes, that's really the plot here. No, I haven't figured out a way to kill the writers yet.

We then switch over to bland 70s family with bland 70s wannabe lighting and color on the screen. They’re moving into a new house. This house has all the perks – places to play hide and seek in AND scary doors that open and close with ominous sound effects laid overtop! We get a long string of just dull as hell scenes – just this family going through every dull attempt at a scare this movie tries to pass off. Their oldest daughter is incredibly bitchy and annoying, and one of the younger daughters sleepwalks.

Witchcraft! Well, maybe if it was the 1770s, but I know it’s not that time period. This movie is too busy trying to shoehorn in blatant references to the 1970s. It’s about as subtle as the Brian De Palma Black Dahlia’s attempt to recreate the ‘40s. Sepia tones and stupid haircuts don’t make your movie any better.

Oh, and the dog dies:

Oh man, our dog just died! Let's never investigate why this happened and never mention it in the movie again. We are so awesome.

Fuck you. Also it’s never mentioned again, and they never investigate it. Glad to see they cared so much about their pet.

If that doesn’t make them care about creepy happenings at the house, how about their daughter having a nightmare and then waking up talking about someone wanting the family dead?

No, I guess that’s not enough to care or move out of the house at all. What’s the reason given for this again? Oh yeah, because they have money invested in the house. That trumps the safety of your family.

You know what does finally get them to do something about it though? One night they’re all sleeping and the sleepwalking daughter comes in, waking up bitchy daughter. Then they see a Grudge ghost and the bitchy daughter starts fighting with herself.

The daughter needs to quit watching bad Japanese movies before bed - they're not doing her imagination much good.

That apparently is enough. They hire Insidious Dad and Orphan Mom onto their case and they get right on it. What follows is about an hour of some of the most boring crap you’ll see in a horror movie these days. It has everything. You got the endless, boring scenes of people talking about whatever ancient histories and pasts the movie somehow thought was interesting – it’s not. It’s really not.

What kind of brain-mash thought this up? It’s practically just an afterthought – toss in some Satanic warbling about ghosts and killing babies, and you got yourself a poorly written horror backstory. Who even gives a shit? Just be honest about it. “We don’t really care at all about establishing a coherent, meaningful or scary story. We just wanted to make a cash grab in time for the end of the summer season. Just send us your money now, you corporate whore rider!”

"Why yes, this scene has been done in every other horror movie in the last decade. But we're still doing it. Because we just don't give a crap."

Play that over these scenes – it’ll be less deceptive. It’s not like there’s anything going on. Some crap about Satanic sacrifice and possession. Bitch, please. If you sacrificed anyone involved in this movie to Satan, he’d just send them right back to Earth with a little pink sticky note saying “Please try again” on it. But I digress – the movie sucks. That’s all I was trying to say.

We also get cliché jump scare scenes, of which there are too many to name. Ooh, are they going to have a quiet scene and then get real loud for the jump scare? Fucking don’t keep me waiting too long – the suspense is killing me. Yes, movie, bouncy balls truly are the way to keeping an audience on the edge of its seat:

40 minutes in and the scariest thing in the fuckin movie is a bouncy ball. Man, this is such a giant piece of shit.

"A bouncy ball killed my father..."

AAAAAGGGGHHHH THAT’S MY ONE GREATEST FEAR!

Don’t tell anyone. I can trust you, right?

But hey, it’s not like we’ve hit every cliché. There’s still one we’re missing! At least they haven’t done anything involving an exorcism yet – oh, wait. It’s the next scene where they mention that. And here I was having some form of hope for humanity left in my soul.

We’ll get to the exorcism soon enough. Before that wonderful scene, we have other things to contend with, like dying birds:

Those are never really talked about either. This movie just seems to hate animals.

We also get some despicably poor dialogue from almost every character. Like when they’re all having a sunny breakfast together the following morning – always good after a fresh round of bird suicides – and the mother says “The house hasn’t been like this in a long time!” Yeah, especially considering you moved in and the creepy shit started the next morning when the dog died. Oh, wait, I forgot nobody in the movie gave a shit about that – my bad.

How about when Insidious Dad gets handed some pancakes from the little girl who was also in Orphan? He’s like “They really are a nice family.” Yes, nice families truly are judged by the number of times little girls hand you pancakes. You goddamned weirdo.

There’s also a scene later where Mr. 70s Bowl Cut Dad finds Insidious Dad working on an old car. 70s Bowl Cut Dad says Insidious Dad “really looks like he knows what he’s doing,” even though all Insidious Dad is doing is sticking his hands inside the open hood of a car. How does that equal “knowing what he’s doing,” you fucking idiot? He could be wiring a car bomb to your engine! Granted, that’s implausible – though it would make this movie so much more entertaining.

Ugh, point is, the dialogue sucks. I guess that’s to be expected when most of the movie consists of dog-shit exposition spouted out like a broken leaky faucet in that scummy bathroom on the subway.

After that we get a scene where the demon tries to snatch the bitchy daughter. I’m not really sure what he’s trying to accomplish – he kinda just drags her around the room. Maybe that’s how he “gets to know” new girls. Or maybe he’s just really bad at “Tag.” Either way, you want to know what they do to free the daughter? Well, no, you don’t care. But I’ll tell you – they just cut off the part of her hair that the demon is holding onto. That somehow stops the demon from doing anything else.

Awesome, she can fly!

What the hell? What kinda pansy-assed pussy demon is this? Is cutting off that one part of her hair really enough? What a wuss. He probably slinked back into the shadows with his tail between his legs. Captain Howdy is laughing at you, you moron.

Elsewhere in the film’s rolls of fat we get references to other movies, like the aforementioned Captain Howdy – referenced here in a music box one of the little girls is holding. It’s poorly thought out and means almost nothing.

Well, “almost” is actually giving the film too much credit. We also get references to the previous movies these actors have been in, like several nods to Insidious in the house and the layout of the rooms. I’m pretty sure the scene where the Orphan mom is looking around the house is almost identical to the beginning of Insidious. Later on we get people looking around a bedroom with UV lights, similar to a certain scene in Orphan.

The first and third pics are from this movie, the second and fourth are from Insidious and Orphan respectively. Can you tell the difference? I wouldn't be able to if I hadn't been the one who took these screenshots. I really think this just points out the deficiency in how samey all of these modern horror movies look, both in the lighting/cinematography and the set pieces. We need some more original shit in the mix.

Originality, what’s that?!

The crowning failure of this whole mess is the climax, in which we get all the same old exorcism clichés you’ve seen before. I’ve gone on rants about this before, but honestly, fuckin’ honestly, what is the appeal? I understand not hating this kind of scene – maybe if these kinds of scenes really scare you for whatever reason. Maybe if you are actually the son of Satan yourself, hissing at the cross, that would scare you. Otherwise I just don’t see it.

Worst frat party hazing ever.

The scene is overly long and cluttered, with maybe a couple nice shots I guess – but mostly it’s pretty weak. There’s some crap shoved in about how the possessed wife has to remember this one really nice day at the beach with her family – this day she apparently said she would never forget.

And nobody is wearing a swimsuit for some reason.

It’s just so forced and contrived – those are the only words. What do we know about this character? She likes the beach. What does that tell us about her personality? She … likes the beach. What relevance does that have to the overall meaning of the story or of her character arc? She likes the fucking beach! God! Can’t you deliver one thing of substance?

Eh, I guess not. Just have a bland happy ending scene of the family hugging out in the sunlight. Because horror movies always have happy endings.

Wait, no they don’t. That’s pretty much the cincher on why this sucks: name one good horror movie with a totally happy ending like this one. I mean it really fucking is – it’s wrapped up nice and neat in a pink bow with a complimentary box of Peeps along with it and a note from the Easter Bunny. There’s no darkness here! Where’s the foreboding and the fear? Name one horror movie that’s any good, that ends in a happy-go-lucky manner like this one does.

Maybe the reasoning for this was the “Based on a True Story” tagline. But really, if the defense is “oh, they’re keeping it true to the original family” – well, no, that is not an excuse at all. You clearly showed no regard for any semblance of reality when you included the exorcism scenes with the screamy bloody ghosts and rolled-backwards eyes. I don’t care how people remembered it in real life – the way it’s presented here is just like any other craptastic exorcism horror film. Not real life.

Frankly, I think this got it closer to real life:

Images copyright of their original owners, I own none of them.

Apartment 143 (2011)

Well, it’s a new year and it’s time for some new movies. So why waste time? Why not start off with one that makes me wish I had never even learned what a ‘movie’ was?

Director: Carles Torrens

Starring: Kai Lennox, Michael O'Keefe

IMDb

I mean this is so bad, I have a hard time even imagining the people who made it are functioning human beings. This was made by cavemen. Or insane asylum patients. I seriously can’t comprehend the level of pure absence of thought it would take to come up with something this asinine. How do these people even get dressed in the morning? How is it that they haven’t caused some kind of nuclear reaction trying to make their oatmeal every day? Because Satan knows, they’ve certainly made a toxic mess out of the art of filmmaking. This is Apartment 143.

We start off with a bunch of morons “testing” their first-person found footage cam. It doesn’t really serve a purpose or anything – it’s just so we don’t forget that the movie is supposed to be “realistic found footage” style. Because the audience is the type that forgets things after five seconds, I’m guessing.

AAAAAHHHHH! Don't eat me!

Hey, that's the same reaction I have to this whole movie!

And yes. These are supposed to be the “paranormal researchers” of the movie, and I put that in quotes because you probably know more about the paranormal than these dingbats will ever know. The characters are pretty one note … an annoying cameraman, some Irish chick whose only role is, well, to be a chick, and a craggy old man for a boss. Isn’t it a great sign for your movie when your actors fall asleep while you’re trying to shoot?

They get to this apartment they’re supposed to be at and immediately start a long train of “setting up sound equipment” scenes, which don’t serve any purpose. Oh, wait, I’m sorry. They do serve a purpose. Two, actually! One is to waste time, because the movie has barely over an hour of actual “storytelling” – a dubious claim to the word, but still. The other is to reiterate for the second time in under ten minutes just how amazing and realistic it is that the movie is using shaky camera found footage gimmicks to tell its story.

The family they’re visiting apparently has some supernatural stuff going on. The father is a complete waste of testosterone who can’t even stand up to his daughter, who is abjectly terrifying. Seriously, she should be the monster in this film:

What kind of a father just lets his daughter scream in his face and slam doors all over the house, then slinking away like a wounded dog? Well, apparently this guy. The backstory to this whole thing is that the family experienced some paranormal stuff in their home and then moved to get away from it. But, shock and awe, the ghost has followed them to their new apartment! So it's basically Insidious, except without anything entertaining.

So the movie just kind of aimlessly meanders along, like a retarded baby elephant. We get some Paranormal Activity rip off scenes here and there, just a bunch of green-lit garbage, mixed in with boring ones of the family eating dinner with the paranormal researchers.

Now on Apartment 143, watching middle aged men sleep!

What point does this scene serve anyway? Pretty much fuckin' nothing at all. How utterly asinine ... this movie seems to think it's being realistic with these scenes, but nobody wants to see this shit! It's the stuff you edit out in the studio when you're putting together a film!

I don’t know why, but that strikes me as funny. Why are they eating dinner together? Was that part of the contract? Did a fine-print clause way at the bottom of the last page demand that the bereaved family make the paranormal researchers dinner?

But hey, at least they do the dishes:

Get used to it guys, it's the only job you'll have after this.

They make some stupid jokes, and then they see that one of the pictures on the wall has been turned upside down. Is that really the best you can do as a “scare” in this movie? Something that basically amounts to the kids messing around and not paying attention when they put a picture back on the wall after knocking it down?

The whole thing is just so contrite. We really need overly long scenes of the family hearing noises in the dark and then just finding out it was the ghost moving a tea kettle? Wasn’t that like a throwaway gag in the Poltergeist movies to create some lighthearted, kid friendly scares more than 30 years ago? How is this relevant, scary or interesting at all?

Hell, maybe the ghost just wanted tea. Ever think of THAT?

Mixed in with that, we get soggy scenes of the dad whining about how his daughter hates him. Apparently the mother in the family died some years back, and the daughter blames the dad for it. His solution is not to try and be a good parent and overcome this maturely, but to whine about it on camera and cry that the mother was the one the daughter really listened to, that he doesn’t know how to communicate – call me insensitive, but I don’t think walking away like a little bitch when your 12-year-old daughter slams the door in your face is going to ease the situation.

And that’s another thing, too – why is he bitching and moaning about all this shit on camera? I guess to an extent, it’s understandable that the researchers need background information. But this guy just goes on and on. Christ. Get a psychiatrist! It’s cheaper and they usually don’t video tape you and put it on Netflix for the world to see.

If you weren’t bored and insulted enough with this movie yet, we get a scene where they’re sitting around analyzing the situation after the family has gone to bed, just as an excuse to shove it in our faces that there are cameras everywhere. WE GET IT.

After some more Paranormal Activity dick-riding, we get a scene the next morning where the father goes in to wake the kids up and the daughter is rude to him again, even telling him to fuck off, because it’s Saturday and she wants to sleep more. At this point, I really have to ask – why is she still even living in that house? Isn’t there some kind of Catholic boarding school the father could send her to, where she could perhaps be hit with a paddle or something every time she tries to mouth off?

I mean there’s just only so much bullshit you can take! There’s being an annoying teenager and then there’s just purely beyond repair. Ship her off to the nunnery!

And get this; the next scene is a séance scene – why don’t you just come out and admit that you’re as bankrupt for ideas as the United States recession from several years ago was for money? What value does a scene like this have? There’s also a part where they even take time out of this movie’s runtime to show the characters setting up mics on everyone – get fucked, movie; you don’t have this kind of time to waste!

Hey, hey, get it? It's found footage! It's realistic! Are you feeling the real horror yet? Get it? It's SO REAL. *gasps for air, forgetting to breathe*

The whole sham is just made all the more laughable and yet perplexing because it doesn’t really do anything. Yeah; nothing happens! What the hell? Jesus, can’t you even try?

So at this point of the film I was just about done. I mean I just couldn’t take it anymore – my brain physically could not take any more of the inane nonsense of the film. What was I supposed to grasp onto? The fact that there’s a several-minute-long scene of the father talking to the douche-bag boss character about what’s really going on? Oh yeah, there’s a real winner of a scene. I’ll sum it up for you in one sentence: the real reason weird stuff is happening is, the daughter is going through puberty.

If you didn’t just press the ‘Back’ button on your browser after reading that, well, why the fuck not? Go do something else. Read a short story. Plant a tree. Help a homeless man buy lunch. Talk to a new potential boyfriend/girlfriend. Why are you even still reading?

Oh well, if you are still reading, let’s talk about this scene in a little more detail. Basically, it’s one of the most poorly put together scenes I’ve seen in a movie in a long time – maybe ever. It’s not just the end result of the guy revealing the “puberty” twist; no no. This whole THING is insane! The guy just rambles on and on … about NOTHING! He’s babbling about how what’s going on is not supernatural, that it’s a “poltergeist syndrome.” Then he says there is nothing supernatural in the universe and parapsychology can be explained by science. Then he goes on to talk about ghosts and spectres and whatnot. How is THAT not supernatural, you human dildo?

Watching this asshole talk in a condescending voice with no changes in the shot and nothing interesting going on OR being said is just about unbearable - call it the eleventh level of Hell.

His conclusion to the whole thing is what I said before – the “poltergeist” following them is really just a manifestation of the daughter’s puberty happening. I think if this was a school term paper, it would get an F. I mean, it’s just so bullshitty – it sounds like the mental excretion of a crazy man. Even if we’re to take the whole “poltergeist syndrome” thing seriously (I guess it’s a real theory), the way the daughter acts in this movie isn’t even consistent with that. Spoiler alert, but yeah, she acts and looks like any old “possessed” person from a Ring or Grudge movie:

Nice contact lenses! Bought those for three bucks at the Halloween store, did you?

Then they hire some “psychic” guy, who looks more like a druggie burnout at a Burning Man concert. The shortest way I can say this is – he’s also fucking insane.

What, are you getting a blowjob under the table? Get the fuck off screen.

Yeah – get this: he says the other side is “just 90 centimeters above our dimension, so that’s why it’s so common to see ghosts from the waist up.” Gee, maybe I’ll vacation there sometime. He also talks about how sensitive ghosts are and how it’s not polite to run away from them. Yeah, those ghosts, man – so sensitive. We really have to be attentive to their feelings and stuff. Otherwise they might write emo poetry on Facebook behind our backs!

I guess these are all legit theories that people have in the realm of ghost studies and whatnot, but even so – isn’t the working theory IN THE MOVIE'S UNIVERSE that it’s NOT anything supernatural? Are you just trying to say that going through puberty is related to ghosts? Because even if you started out with a real paranormal theory, I think even a herd of bulls would gag on the bullshit you're shoveling now.

Then we get the daughter possessed with her eyes all white, talking in a retarded voice about how her father mistreated her somehow – for a minute you end up thinking this is a repressed child molestation story, but nope, that isn’t it either. Then she blows him through a wall.

Breaking that window probably cost them every cent they had. Was it worth it? I guess when the next scene has him eating dinner with his head bowed in shame, the answer is revealed - this is really just an unintentional comedy.

I’m sorry, so what did that psychic guy accomplish? Right, absolutely nothing except more pain, suffering and confusion for these people. I hope the family isn’t paying these hacks too much.

Later on we get the father telling his whole story … with one camera shot, held steady for almost ten minutes while he talks. GOD this movie is annoying.

So, here’s the gist – his wife went crazy and didn’t take care of the kids out of some unbalanced mental state. Then she cheated on him. THERE. THAT WAS EASY. WHY DID YOU NEED TEN MINUTES TO TELL THIS STORY?

Then the whole movie just sort of gives up and goes nuts on you. Lots of screaming, shaky cameras and the boss guy telling the cameraman to KEEP FILMING, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES STOP FILMING, KEEP FILMING SO WE HAVE A FLIMSY WAY TO COVER UP THE PLOT HOLE OF THE CAMERA BEING THERE AT ALL! Maybe I added in that last one from my own opinion. But I doubt it.

In the middle of all the chaos, he looks back and gives that expression to the camera. I really have a hard time believing this was intentional. I think he just wanted to fuck with the movie and so he added in an inappropriately silly face at a "serious" moment. Good job, guy!

There's also a weird thing where he keeps telling Camera Guy to not worry about the Irish chick, saying she's fine over and over again. I dunno, guy. She could be in trouble. I mean, look:

Oh, but I guess helping someone would ruin the integrity of the oh-so-important ghost puberty movie they're shooting. So, yeah, I'm not even kidding; they don't help her. Chivalry is dead. But then again, she does survive at the end, so I guess Mr. Douche Bag Boss was onto something. Not that you'll really be able to get to the end though, without having a seizure from the camera work.

So after all this bullshit, they have some really epic, amazing way to save her, right? Some truly fitting climax for the story? Nope, they just grab her hand once and then she falls down and it’s over.

"April Fool's! I was never really possessed at all! Ha ha ha..." Well, that doesn't happen, but I wish it had.

How anticlimactic. But hey, if it means this movie is shorter, I’m all for it! So really this was a good way to resolve the whole stupid conflict.

After it’s all over, the boss guy and the cameraman stand around exchanging ridiculous dialogue. I’ll give you an example:

CAMERAMAN: Strange day, doc.

BOSS: The strangest day of my life. With a possible exception or two.

Heh heh, yeah, because this movie is so shitty even the characters don’t really think what happened was a big deal. Remember, kids: going through puberty means you turn into a possessed Grudge ghost crawling on the ceiling!

Nothing about this made sense! It was 67 minutes of nothing but pure stupidity. An insult to anyone with a brain. I mean it's a horror movie with a whiny pre-teen girl as the villain. I think I would call that a new low in human entertainment. Personally I’d rather just stare at a wall for 67 minutes. Horrible movie, nothing good about it, just don’t watch it.

Images copyright of their original owners; I do not own any of them.

REVIEW: The Exorcist (1973)

If I had a nickel for every demonic possession movie that came out these last five years or so, I’d be rich enough to make sure there was never another one. I mean honestly. What subset of movies has been sucked dry more than this? Let's just take a look at some of these wonderfully creative films which have so much of their own ideas...

 

...and the list goes on. It’s gone beyond beating a dead horse and more into beating a dead horse with the flogged carcass of another dead horse, while sitting on a third dead horse. Where does it end? Where did it begin?

Well, we can answer the second question.

Director: William Friedkin

Starring: Linda Blair, Ellen Burstyn

IMDb

Yes, The Exorcist, often touted as one of the scariest movies ever made. And rightly so. It’s a masterpiece. It is one of the most richly textured horror films out there, as much a drama as it is a horror film really. But at the same time, it also packs some of the blackest, vilest depths of evil you will ever see in a film. But to truly understand this masterpiece of cinema, we must call a priest and have him cast out everything from the movie so we can examine it.

The movie begins slowly, with an old man out in Iraq discovering some mysterious artifacts that remind him of something long-past that we don’t know about yet. We get some quiet build-ups that really just establish his character and the hesitation he’s going through. We fade out on a shot of him standing in the desert against a demonic shadow figure.

Pretty damn effective and ominous.

Then we get our main characters, Regan and Chris, who are both women born in that strange ambiguous time when men and womens’ names seemed to be interchangeable. Chris is an actress and spends her time trying to make her hairdo as gender-ambiguous as her name. When she’s not doing that, she hangs out with her British director, Burke Dennings, and plays with Regan in the evenings. Regan has made a new invisible friend named Captain Howdy, who I think used to hang out with the Devil’s Rejects cast before this movie.

Another difference between then and now: parents would immediately become suspicious in 2013 if their little girls started saying they were hanging out with Captain Howdy.

So the movie unfolds pretty slow and comfortably, taking its time to set up its characters. Shit – most modern movies would have had about twenty jump scares at this point. Some people might confuse this kind of pacing as sluggish, but I like it. It sets up everything very well and you get to like the characters pretty well. We get introduced to our other main character in Father Damien Karras, a priest in the city losing his faith while his ailing mother passes away under the gaze of uncaring relatives.

Here’s another thing this does so well – it really does a good job with those scenes of people trying to figure out what’s wrong with Regan. To start with, there really isn’t much of a transition into her getting sick. We get introduced to the character, she seems okay, and after we return from some of the Father Karras scenes, she’s just in the hospital – bam. No other explanation needed. I love how we find out a lot of the stuff wrong with her just through Chris talking with the doctors. There are no goofy over the top jump scares and no bullshit mythos – it’s all very grounded in reality at first, which is really the way to go. Unfortunately these days, we are so over-saturated with these kinds of stories and we have the Internet to contend with, so it wouldn’t be believable quite as much to have a scene like this in, say, The Last Exorcism III: The Dead Horse.

In The Exorcist though, we get some very good, detailed scenes of hard-working doctors trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with Regan. There are some expensive medical treatments and some very uncomfortable scenes. The film, again, takes its time. Remember in my Paranormal Activity review when I said research isn’t scary? This is the exception.

The reason is because it’s all so slowly built up – the film crawls toward its point by establishing that the characters really have no other options to turn to. Chris is pushed to her breaking point and simply cannot find any other explanation except the supernatural. She becomes so desperate that she ends up accepting the one thing she never thought she would: demonic forces from another plane of existence.

"Hmmm...my diagnosis is, you're fucked."

That’s really, really good, actually. If you’ve never seen this movie before, let me go back and explain a bit – in the middle of the research scenes where the doctors are puzzled about what’s wrong with Regan, one of the doctors asks if she or Regan has any religious beliefs. Chris replies that no, neither one of them do. Which would be a fairly commonplace thing nowadays – many people are atheists now and it’s not something to be ashamed of. Most people don’t even blink at that. But this was the 70s, when we as a country were just starting to come out of the long shadow of the Church and of religion in general. It was a confusing, transitional time and people were moving away from the old guard of religious beliefs – the world was changing.

And that’s the cincher right there – that’s why this movie is so scary. Because it takes a woman who, by all accounts is rational and modernistic in this world, and shows her that really, everything we know as sophisticated, civilized and modern is just a bunch of shit. Really, the old world never left and it never will leave – the old world is eternal and the Devil is real. That’s fuckin’ terrifying, man. That’s the pitch blackest horror there is. The Exorcist takes our changing, atheistic and unchristian world and turns it upside down.

The expression on their faces sums up the movie for me: pure fear masked by a shaky confidence in science and manmade inventions, even though what lies beneath the Earth is about to take over. Terrifying.

So yeah, I guess I should talk about the Regan devil-possession scenes…they’re pretty damned gross. I don’t think these scenes by themselves are anything that scary as much as they are disturbing. I mean, especially if you don’t like people vomiting up green bile. In that case, don’t watch Troll 2. You’ll probably have an aneurysm.

There's one for the family photo albums!

These scenes are just crazy. I mean, there’s one scene where she scuttles down the stairs backwards with her mouth bleeding. I don’t think there’s enough antibiotics in the world for that. Plus, this scene comes on the tails of Regan discovering that her director friend is dead and that Regan’s doctors can’t help her. Jesus. Can this woman’s life get any worse? Why not just add in the fact that she doesn’t get to appear in the sequel to the mix?

Oh, well, that last one – probably a plus…but still:

So we get some scenes of this detective guy who looks like a drunk, out-of-work Paul Newman investigating Father Karras – ironically, he says Father Karras looks like Paul Newman. Maybe having Paul Newman in this movie wouldn’t have been a bad idea. You could have had him be the possessed one. That would be something…especially if he played the role of the daughter just like Linda Blair does. I’m not going to post a picture of that, but just let it sit in your mind for a while: a little girl contracts an otherworldly possession and turns into Paul Newman. Terrifying.

And yes, I fully realize the above passage will never be entered into the annals of my all-time funniest jokes on the blog. Shut up. The detective guy’s only character seems to be inviting the people he interrogates to go see movies with him. I guess it’s supposed to be a way to try and bribe them, but I dunno; I’m more inclined to think he just has no friends after letting the killer in 12 Angry Men go free.

Well I never!

Either way he doesn’t get very far, and the movie mostly focuses on Chris’s attempts to save Regan. She finally consults with Father Karras, who has become a tortured soul after his mother passed away. Karras takes her seriously enough to start an investigation into whether or not Regan’s case merits an exorcism.

This is yet another difference from most other movies that took influence from The Exorcist: these scenes actually take their time and feel realistic. The Church above all is not just some transparent entity that lets people do whatever they want – there are rules. And very few times – much less in films like The Possession, The Devil Inside or The Conjuring – would they actually just allow an exorcism. But here we have the exception: this is the case that throws everyone for a loop, that proves the Church wrong after years of nothing, here’s another exorcism they have to do, nestled in this modern agnostic world.

Movies today just treat exorcisms like any other everyday thing: “Oh, damn, time for another exorcism again. Want to meet for coffee after?” Just try and tell me with a straight face that any of the scenes in The Conjuring that try and make this idea suspenseful are any good. Fucking please. This is the real deal. Here it feels like things matter. You, the viewer, feel the weight of Karras’s discovery and of the decision to perform the exorcism. That matters a lot.

They recruit Father Merrin, who was the old man from the opening, to come and help out. Apparently because Merrin has so much experience after almost dying the last time he did an exorcism. How do you think that conversation went? “Hey, Father Merrin…remember that time you almost died doing that extremely dangerous exorcism? …Want to do it again?” How rude.

So then we get the exorcism scenes, which are great in part just because any movie that can make two guys standing over a wrinkled Muppet reject and shouting “The power of Christ compels you!” suspenseful is doing something right.

"And for my next trick, I'll make a sequel without any logic or sense in it whatsoever!"

But we quickly find out that it doesn’t work as well as they’d like. Karras tries, but the demon in Regan just won’t let him forget his dearly departed mother, channeling her at every turn to rattle him. Karras has to go downstairs, and when he comes back up, Father Merrin has been killed by the demon. Losing control, Karras goes and strangles Regan until the demon leaves her and comes into him instead. Then he jumps out a window and dies, ending the demon’s reign of terror forever…or until the two sequels came out. But either way, hurray!

The ending does raise some interesting questions though – they went through all that ritualistic bullshit when the real way to beat the demon was just to strangle it out with your bare hands? How stupid they must be feeling now! Ha ha…a good man just lost his life. But seriously though. I really do like the subtext here: religion isn’t all-powerful, the Church isn’t all-knowing. In place of a holy, sacrosanct ritual, it’s blunt violence that wins the day in this movie. That’s pretty important.

And it’s a very important movie. As gruesome and unpleasant as The Exorcist can be, it really is a prime example of horror working outside its bounds and making something artistic and meaningful, while still being scary and suspenseful. It’s the best of both worlds, and an all-time classic. If you’ve never seen this, and are enamored with its pale imitators…well, you need to treat yourself to this movie this Halloween. Whether or not you agree with me that its modern-day imitators are crap, there is no denying the power of The Exorcist.

Happy Halloween!

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