Horror Bound Revisited - The Last Exorcism
Every once in a while, I like to revisit horror films that I generally didn’t have a good appreciation for. This series of reviews is going to be called Horror Bound Revisited and will be my usual style of how I review a film, but will focus primarily on movies that I used to dislike…and since it’s been about a decade now, why not start with a movie that made its debut the summer I moved to America from my home and native land, Canada? Here is my review for… The Last Exorcism.
The Last Exorcism was a found footage horror film released in August of 2010, directed by Daniel Stamm, and is about Pastor Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) as he struggles to deal with a loss of faith, agreeing to let a film crew (Iris Bahr as the documentarian, and Eli Roth as the cameraman…who also produced this film) follow him to a small town in Louisiana where he has agreed to perform an exorcism (his last one) on a particularly troubled young woman named Nell (played brilliantly by Ashley Bell). Unfortunately for Pastor Marcus…he’s going to need to find his faith in a hurry…because not all is as it seems.
To start, when I initially saw this film back in 2010, I was not a huge fan. The story felt kind of rushed, the camera work was the usual shaky cam style that would make people who have motion sickness probably puke, and I didn’t fully grasp the subplot of a man of the cloth who has lost his faith. But let me tell you after re-watching this film…it totally stands up today and it is probably on my list of favorite found footage films. Let’s dig a bit deeper, shall we?
There is a bit of bad filmmaking going on here, but not much. I mean, the acting is a bit on the cheesy side, particularly on the part of Patrick Fabian, but as the film progresses, I don’t really know how to explain it…he kind of grows on you. Ashley Bell is without a doubt the film’s brightest star. She came off as charming, troubled, creepy, disturbed, sad…her performance made me feel pretty much every single emotion in the spectrum.
The camera work is like I said above, the usual shaky cam affair that plagues every found footage film. It felt like chimps were tossing around a handycam or something. The visual effects are something that really got under my skin, particularly the now infamous barn scene (spoilers: there’s a lot of cracking sounds that…yeesh…) and one near the end that deals with a massive bonfire.
Something else that is hugely underrated in this film was the score; it was creepy and really did a good job of building a sense of dread and atmosphere. Something that I didn’t realize upon first viewing is that this is a PG-13 film and despite there being a bit of blood (I almost yeet’d the movie because…spoiler alert…there’s an animal death…) most deaths do happen off-screen.
Is this movie perfect? No, far from it, but once you figure out the pieces of the plot, get into the dramatic bits of the story, you actually find a film that is really quite powerful. The horrific visuals and general creepiness of the film is just the first layer, it’s far more complex than that, and it’s something I’m ashamed to admit I missed out on the first time around. It totally holds up today and is a film that will get under your skin. It’s a great addition to the found footage genre and if you love that and/or exorcism/demon movies, this is totally a movie you’ll want to revisit.
Don’t want to miss anything on the site? Sign up for our newsletter HERE
Want more horror movie reviews? Just search below:
