Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) is a second-generation priest and veteran exorcist being followed around by a documentary crew. He no longer believes in exorcisms, however, and merely performs the services for money to feed his family, and hopefully providing benefit to the psychological health of the supposedly afflicted. He and the doco crew head to his latest gig on a farm in Louisiana where fundamentalist/traditionalist father Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum) believes his 16 year-old daughter (Ashley Bell) is demonically possessed and somehow behind the slaughtering of his livestock. The Reverend treats this as any other crackpot case and goes through the motions of his schtick, rigging up sound FX and the like, and seems to do away with any demons quite easily. But when he goes back to his hotel room that night, the Reverend finds the girl in his room. He starts to suspect she’s seriously psychologically unbalanced, and her behaviour only gets more erratic and disturbing.
Although I have a general disdain for handheld, shake-cam style filmmaking, and putting aside the fact that the “Blair Witch Project” approach of horror filmmaking is hardly new, I decided to just judge this film solely on its merits if at all possible. For the most part I was able to do that and enjoyed this 2010 horror mockumentary from filmmaker Daniel Stamm (a German-born director in only his second film). In fact, aside from one shot towards the end, the film finds its own identity. People looking for straight-up, terror might be bored senseless pretty early on, but I was largely entertained and intrigued here from the word go.
The film convinces fairly early on, despite the “Omen”-esque subject matter, and the main character played by Patrick Fabian is especially interesting. What I found most hilarious about him is that whilst being a charlatan (albeit one who exposes other frauds), he’s also a smug SOB. At times this plays more like a black comedy than horror, kinda like “Mythbusters” by way of “Paranormal Activity”. Lead actress Ashley Bell is also excellent as the supposedly possessed girl. Quite adorable in the early going, actually. She’s totally convincing even in moments where the film itself isn’t quite on point. I hope she gets a decent career out of this film. And damn is the girl flexible (She has something called hypermobility, thus there are no FX used for her on-screen contortions).
I also liked that even though you could see that the dad might be a very bad influence (if not even worse than that) on Bell, it still didn’t explain everything. Either it is legit possession or a hoax. And if it’s a hoax, by whom? On whom? So writers Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland (who were originally going to direct until Stamm came on board) deserve credit for keeping us guessing throughout.
The film isn’t perfect. We occasionally get some annoying third person camera shots that break the faux-documentary illusion. Exterior establishing shots are cool but don’t fit the film’s M.O. The camerawork overall is mostly steady, but the zooming in and out is really excessive and unnecessary. Cinematographer Zoltan Honti should be raked over the coals for that (Is he a huge Jesus Franco fan?). And then there’s that very obvious (and outdated at this point) shot composition steal from “The Blair Witch Project” that makes an otherwise not bad conclusion (certainly better than I’d heard) something a bit lesser than it could’ve been. Full marks, though, for not ending up where I thought the film would. The idea had crossed my mind , but it wasn’t the conclusion I’d ultimately settled on. I’m not sure why people hate the ending so much as they do, it’s just one part of the ending that I didn’t like. What were you all expecting?
OVERALL SUMMARY
This isn’t anything brilliant, but it’s a perfectly enjoyable horror film, with a mockumentary style and black comedy bent. It won’t be for every horror enthusiast’s tastes, but I enjoyed it.
