BEFORE: OK, New York Comic-Con is a no-go for me this year, maybe I'll never go back, who knows. Instead I worked the opening night of Newfest, which is a festival devoted to LGBTQ material, I'm not directly connected with that movement, but I can still support their rights to assemble and watch films about other people with similar inclinations - it's what makes America great, our differences and our recognition that all people have rights, not just the ones we agree with or who look like us or who live like us. That includes the pursuit of happiness, and for many people the path of that pursuit is rainbow-colored, and that's OK. Ya dig?
It's just another gig, really, crowded like Comic-Con only less nerdy and more fabulous. As long as I get paid for my time, who cares what the gig is? I mean, I wouldn't work a Nazi festival or an anti-human rights festival, but I don't think there are any gigs like that. Anyway, the opening night party is still probably going on somewhere in Manhattan, they don't tell me where because I don't need to know, I just want people to clear out of the theater so I can lock it up and go home and watch a movie. Ya dig?
Russell Crowe carries over from "Kraven the Hunter".
THE PLOT: In 1987, Gabriel Amorth, the Vatican's leading exorcist, investigates the demonic possession of an American boy in Spain, and discovers a secret the church has tried to keep buried for centuries.
AFTER: This film is allegedly based on two books written by the "real" Father Gabriele Amorth, the 1990 book "An Exorcist Tells His Story" and its sequel, but come on, aren't all exorcism movies just re-makes of the classic William Friedkin film "The Exorcist" from 1973? In the same way that all shark attack movies are based on "Jaws" and "Clueless" was really based on a Jane Austen novel? Of course, that 1973 film was based on a 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty, and the book is now looked at as very controversial, the author was inspired by a story he heard about an exorcism that was performed on a possessed child, however when a journalist later investigated this supposed "real" exorcism, he found evidence that the boy had serious emotional problems stemming from his home life, and there was no evidence to support the demonic possession. Well, you know how stories tend to grow with each retelling, it sounds likely that the "real" exorcism was something of an urban legend that grew and grew.
Demonic possession is referred to in many cultures, however there is the possibility that what we're witnessing in a "possessed" person is just some altered state of consciousness, loss of personal identity and awareness combined with a dissociative disorder, the subject may even believe that they are possessed as a way to explain how they're suffering from some kind of chemical imbalance or physical pain. My parents both suffer from congestive heart failure, my mother's had it longer but my father has it too - in that state a lot of fluid builds up in their bodies, and when my sister took my father to a hospital they gave him a diuretic to reduce the fluid, however it affected his state of mind, made his dementia worse and he was very angry and convinced that the nurses were trying to kill him. Just one dose of this diuretic can cause withdrawal symptoms that include body tremors, panic attacks, anger and confusion - plus he was hyper and wired when he was ON the medication and he had to be restrained. This was not normal, but if this can happen to an elderly man, it can also happen to a small child who ingests a toxin or a drug or has a bad reaction to one, and that could look a lot like demonic possession, I think. Other similar effects could be caused by epilepsy, schizophrenia, Tourette's syndrome, or drug abuse.
But for the faithful, the easiest way to explain things is by putting God in charge of the world, and if you have God, then you have to have the Devil, because people need to feel like they're in charge of their fates - they need to choose the path of righteousness and turn their backs on the wages of sin, or it all means nothing in the end. OK, so right there's a big contradiction, who's in control, God or man? God made the universe, God put everything in motion, he made a heaven and a hell but he left the ultimate choice between them up to US? Nah, not buying it. We're just dust specks floating around an enormous void, standing on a big rock that's being carried on the cosmic wind. Where does God exist, out beyond the edges of space, so far we can't even see it with the new super-telescopes? Then how the hell do we get to heaven, our energy can't travel that far, not at any speed. And hell's down below, inside the earth? Well, sure, it may be hot down there but nothing can survive in the pressure and heat of earth's molten caramel core, let alone the souls of the wicked. It's all based on concepts that early man came up with long ago, before he had any science to prove or disprove anything. Who told us the universe works this way, where the pious ascend and the wicked are cast out? God told us? Well, that's mighty convenient, like a self-proving theory - I'd like to see some corroboration, please. The Norse believed that the Earth was just a branch of the World Tree, and the universe was created when a giant cow licked an iceberg or something, God creating heaven and earth and all the animals in seven days seems equally as far-fetched.
The exorcist here, Father Amorth, freely admits when he's called before a church tribunal that the vast majority of the exorcisms he performs are not genuine. Some "possessed" people just have mental illnesses, others just need attention, and still others just need to be reminded that God cares enough about them to send someone to cast out their "demons" and forgive their sins. OK, great, maybe this guy is being honest about being a liar, which also seems like a contradiction, but I get it. He's using the framework of exorcisms to bring God's message to the people, how he'll care for them in this life and the next, provided they go to church, confess their sins and not let their mind and body be taken over by "demons" like addiction, casual sex and homosexuality, and all the other stuff the Vatican doesn't approve of.
But then the film goes on to show us the 1%, the one exorcism that involves an actual demon, one who knows things about Amorth's history that nobody else could know. When Amorth is called to Spain to help a young boy seemingly possessed, the boy makes references to a pig that Amorth tempted a demon to possess so that he'd leave a teenage boy's body, and then he shot the pig, presumably destroying the demon or sending it back to hell. He also knows Amorth's secret shame of not believing a mentally ill woman in the past who asked for Amorth's help, but he didn't believe her and she died by jumping off a building. He also taunts Amorth with memories from World War II, and since the kid is only like eight years old in 1987, how the heck could he even know about that?
OK, so maybe this demon is the real deal. Amorth and the local priest, Father Esquibel, have to somehow learn the demon's name in order to cast it out, perhaps an examination of the former abbey that the boy's family lives in will reveal something - sure, by all means, let's start in the spooky catacombs of this religious building, it's not like they'll find a bunch of skeletons from the Spanish Inquisition along with information that will completely change what we all know about that period in history...
But except for this stuff, the confrontation with the demon follows pretty much the same path as the one seen in the original "Exorcist" film back in 1973 - the older, more experienced priest teaming up with the younger, naive one to say the prayers, resist the temptations and tricks of the demon and command it to leave the child's body and return to Hell. The special effects are way, way better, but essentially it's the same exact story. Amorth offers himself up to be possessed instead of the boy - symbolically he IS the pig from the opening sequence, he is also Father Karras from the 1973 film, only with a more positive outcome. But the two priests find when they report back to the Vatican that there is now a map to all of the other "evil" sites around the world that need to be visited and re-consecrated, so prepare yourself for a sequel I guess.
Directed by Julius Avery (director of "Overlord")
Also starring Daniel Zovatto (last seen in "Laggies"), Alexandra Essoe (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Franco Nero (last seen in "Letters to Juliet"), Peter DeSouza-Feighoney, Laurel Marsden, Cornell John (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Ryan O'Grady, Bianca Bardoe (last seen in "Gran Turismo"), Santi Bayon, Paloma Boyd (last seen in "The Cold Light of Day"), Alessandro Gruttadauria, River Hawkins, Jordi Collet, Carrie Munro, Edward Harper-Jones, Matthew Sim (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Victor Solé (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea"), Tom Bonington, Andrea Dugoni, Pablo Raybould and the voice of Ralph Ineson (last seen in "The Creator").
RATING: 5 out of 10 Cardinals (the priests, not the birds, but they're here too)
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