REVIEW: The ABCs of Death (2012)

ABCs of Death? What is that, a childrens’ picture book for demons? What kind of a title is that? Well, I’m sure it will no doubt be the only strange thing about this film.

Director: Various

Starring: The alphabet

IMDb

*one viewing later*

Okay, so this is actually a sort of compilation of short films, titled in order with letters of the alphabet. A lot of these directors are foreign and not very well known, and it really goes a long way to show, with the best ones, how much more there is to horror movies than the latest crap in American theaters. Of course, it’s a double edged sword, and while some of these shorts are quite good, a lot of them fall more under the ‘holy shit, what the fuck did I just watch?’ category. Interested yet? Let’s take a dive into The ABCs of Death.

We start off with A is for Apocalypse, which features a husband and wife with some slight marital problems…

Boy, the theatrical release of 'Gone Girl' is more violent then I thought it'd be...

She hacks away at him a bit, tries to fight him and he just sits around looking kinda like Peter’s dad from Heroes. Apparently he can’t be killed and is immortal, or something. Then the window outside turns red and we find out she was trying to save him from an even worse death at the hands of…the apocalypse! Dun dun dun! See, I thought this was good. It was short but yet, not everything was revealed right away. It held its plot twist until the end, and then just stopped without anything else happening. It’s all in the implication – you imagine what happened in your mind. It’s effective and works well as a nice, short horror tale.

Then we get B is for Bigfoot, which is a pretty nice slasher tale. I have to say it never gets old seeing stupid characters get what’s coming to them. Here we see a bitchy babysitter tell a little girl a horrifying story just so she can go have sex with her boyfriend. You know, I can understand this character’s motivations. The need to have sex is totally worth the price of emotionally and mentally scarring a little girl for life. They get killed by a guy with a pizza cutter, which is always a dignified way to go...

C is for Cycle is pretty much the movie Triangle except actually good. It’s a cool, trippy little tale about a guy who keeps waking up in different places and hearing things. Then he realizes it’s because he has become stuck in a time loop and his past self is trying to kill him!

D is for Dogfight comes next, a brutal tale that truly encapsulates the old sensationalistic journalism headline “Man Bites Dog”:

It’s actually a very intense segment with a lot of slow motion and no real dialogue, just distorted, slowed-down shouting. Really harrowing. But if you want to take the edge off, just picture that this is a bizarre-world in which everyone talks like this normally! No video editing at all! The story ends with the dog coming to his senses and realizing that the guy he’s fighting is his master. They enact some Biblical vengeance on the fuckers who kidnapped the dog, and that’s it. Bad ass.

E is for Exterminate…guy tries to kill pesky teleporting spiders around his apartment over a series of very short “days.” I don’t know why, clearly they just want to be his friend! But this isn’t the weird part. No, the weird part is the next one: F for Fart.

Okay, so this is a Japanese one, which means it’s about as sane as your decrepit grandfather who claims to talk to Abraham Lincoln in his sleep. But even for THAT it’s still bat shit crazy. I mean the first frame has a high school girl, “cute” uniform and all, talking about how she’s ashamed of farting. If that isn’t weird enough, we then see the world start to end via a black cloud of pollution which the girl calls “the fart of God.” Which is probably accurate. Japan has been attacked by pretty much everything else already, so it’s only natural God would try farting on them…kinda lazy though.

But that other stuff is only the icing on the cake. The next thing we see is the main girl going into some warehouse with a teacher of hers. Then she says she wants to die smelling the teacher’s farts. In every other civilized country in the whole world, this would be met with revulsion followed by appearances on Dr. Phil and Conan O’Brien, and then the rest of the girl’s life in a mental institution. But in Japan the teacher is happy to do it.

Someone out there is jerking off to this right now. Weep for humanity.

Then she magically pops inside the teacher’s ass, where the teacher also appears in a yellowish void and they embrace in a fetal position.

I finally get it now. The whole thing is a metaphor. In reality everything that's happening is a visual representation of this girl's sick and twisted daydream fantasy about her teacher. Of course! The social ramifications of the repressed Japanese youth are...still not enough to save this from being crap.

No, no, NO! YOU CANNOT HAVE A LESBIAN MAKE-OUT SCENE INSIDE ONE OF THEIR ANUSES! NOBODY WOULD EVER FIND THAT SEXY! JUST STOOOOOOOP!

I…I just don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. I’ve lost all conception of reality! Someone send help quick!

Well, if you actually kept watching after that, the next short is G for Gravity, a short bit of nothing about a guy killing himself by weighing himself to the bottom of the ocean with bricks. Usually someone else has to do that for you. I think they’re Italian and run in familial packs most of the time…and usually, they do things like this after, shall we say, financial disagreements. Or so I hear.

Next is H for Hydro-Electric Diffusion.

That’s it…I quit.

I’m done. I’m never reviewing anything ever again.

Those are supposed to be his balls. He got punched in the nads and then his balls came out his mouth, glowing like stars. Yes, really.

It’s…it’s a fucking dog in a soldier uniform and pilot cap and a cat lady Nazi stripper; how can I even talk about it?! What the fuck am I even going to say? What possible good could come of ever analyzing such a brain-mash of retarded ideas? I’m done. That’s the final straw; I’m leaving right now.

Sigh…okay, okay. I love you guys too much to really do that. Plus I don’t like leaving anything unfinished. 

So then we get I is for Ingrown, about some sick fuck who put his own wife in a bathtub and kills her with an injection of some kind of skin disease virus. The story is told through very dark, vague narrations of the woman as she loses her mind, mostly downplaying the man as “basic and primal.” Depressing, chilling and hard to watch, one of the better in here.

J is for Jidai-geki…weird Japanese facial expressions, then suicide. That’s about all you need to know. K is for Klutz, a stupid cartoon about a woman taking a shit that proceeds to jump out of the toilet and then kill her. Mostly harmless.

L is for Libido shows what happens when you sign on to be on the world’s sickest game show – two guys get strapped down to chairs mostly naked, and have to jerk off to whatever sick shit gets put in front of them. At first it’s just naked women with weird painted faces, but it slowly gets worse with each ‘level’ until level 13 is some fat guy having sex with a little boy. Gee. If that’s 13, what are the levels after that like? Hmmm…

Level 57:

Level 99:

Level 666:

M is for Miscarriage is like two minutes long and guess what it’s about. That’s right, it’s about philosophical discussions.

N is for Nupitals shows the perils of marriage yet again, as we see some guy propose to his girlfriend brilliantly with a parrot. Oh, if I could count all the happy marriages I’ve seen that begin with parrots…anyway, then the parrot starts re-enacting a sex scene the guy had with some other bimbo. Because you know how it is, guys about to sincerely propose to their girlfriends usually have sex with other women on the way home first. The parrot even starts mimicking the sex sounds. It really happens!

Then the girlfriend murders the guy with a kitchen knife and stabs him repeatedly. Somehow I think this girl was already screwed up in the head before this. I mean, it seemed to come pretty natural to her; stabbing her boyfriend that many times.

O is for Orgasm…artistic sort of thing about people having sex. Lots of cool shots and some very interesting directing choices make it one of the better cuts in this thing. There isn’t much to say, as there isn’t actually a story going on here, but the artistic feeling and expression is top notch.

Vomiting rainbow colors = orgasms now...apparently...I dunno, I got nothing else. It was hard enough taking a pic for this short.

Then comes P is for Pressure, a very disturbing real-life tale about a stripper with two kids who falls on some hard times after her boyfriend robs her blind while she’s not at home. She can’t pay her bills even with her stripper job, and so she has to take a second job in a “crush” film – which basically means she has to step on a cat so a bunch of sick fucks can get off to it.

Apparently, yeah, this is actually a real thing…I’m really just speechless here. To think of the kinds of people who enjoy things like this is to acknowledge the worst examples of humanity. I mean really think about it – what possible justification could there be for making movies like that? If you can’t get off except to sick torture of innocent little animals, I think it’s time you checked yourself into a mental hospital, because – news flash – you have serious problems.

But yeah, the actual short is one of the best in this whole thing, as it has some very artful Beasts of the Southern Wild-esque camera work and editing, plus clear characterization even in only a few minutes. It’s a social piece and very important. Harrowing and dark, but vital.

Q for Quack is the funniest one in here, about the director and writer trying to come up with an idea for a short film for the anthology - very meta of them. They decide to shoot a duck because "no one gives a shit about animals." They decide this while doing heavy cocaine and filming a woman with large breasts - well, that's how Quentin Tarantino got a whole career, so I guess it works. They end up shooting each other instead of the duck.

The evil lord and master of all ducks, and all life for that matter...little known fact, he psychically manipulated their guns to shoot them instead of him! What a genius!

Then we get R is for Removed. Wow, we’ve gone almost a whole twenty minutes without stupid potty humor and penis jokes, what a miracle…this is another one of the best in the collection, with a dark and macabre story about some guy who gets used for a horrific experiment by some corrupt doctors, where his skin is turned into a film reel or something. There's a really cruel, dark scene where they have the poor guy in a fuckin' cage on display like an animal.

Who is this guy? Why are they doing this? Never explained, and it should STAY that way. Because as is, this is a chilling and scary tale that lets your imagination get to work like any good horror story does. Watching the guy get his bloody revenge is awesome too. Killer little flick.

S is for Speed is a very Lynchian, Mulholland Drive-ish little thing about a kidnapping gone wrong. Apparently some lady is kidnapping some other lady to offer as a sacrifice to the grim reaper in her place. The reaper says no, though, and takes her instead. And then we see it was all sort of a metaphor for the two girls both dying of a drug overdose. Very depressing. But I’m just wondering why the grim reaper in this looks more like a Lord of the Rings villain...

T is for Toilet…a Claymation short about a kid who’s afraid of toilets. We then see why:

Maybe have one parent stay in the bathroom with this kid at all times. Or just don't breed at all.

U is for Unearthed, a short piece about a monster getting killed by some townspeople. Cool camera work, but really no story at all. Maybe if they’d given it an extra minute and fleshed it out more, it woulda been better. As is, just sort of forgettable.

V is for Vagitus is a lame short, sort of a sci fi thing, with acting about as credible as any two-bit commercial on late night TV. The whole thing is just full of sci fi cliché and isn’t in any way very interesting. I’ve seen better sci fi stories from little kids playing with action figures.

W is for WTF! is a pretty oddball one again just full of random images thrown at you because they couldn’t think of anything for ‘W.’ Literally, that’s the answer we get. I’m not just being snarky this time! It’s kinda funny but at the same time, not really anything you’d need to watch twice…

X for XXL is about a fat woman who apparently lives on the most hate-filled street in the entire world, as in a two minute walk she is harassed by three different groups of people who make fun of her weight. I know fat people get bullied, but c’mon, this is just a goofy way of portraying it! Maybe one person making a rude comment, but three in a row just as she’s walking down the street to her house? Jesus. Then in her living room she decides to torture herself by watching the one channel where commercials with skinny Asian girls in bikinis play 24/7 – yes, only commercials. Nothing else.

I know that's not what's literally happening. Shut up. It's funnier in my imagined version where there's a channel that plays nothing but these commercials.

Then she decides to take the easy way out:

What did she really think was going to happen after this; that she'd get invited to pose for Vogue?

Pretty decent commentary on American fascination with perfect bodies – not bad, but a bit too goofy. Drives its point home well enough, though.

Y for Youngbuck, the story of the worst deer hunter in the world. You’re not supposed to rape little children after you kill a deer in a manner more befitting of Jason Voorhees, buster. You’re just supposed to kill the stupid deer and take it home.

Were they just trying to prove that they could combine deer hunting and child rape in a four minute short? What the hell?

Z is for Zetsumetsu is…I’m not gonna lie here; it’s pretty much just eyeball-gouging bad. It’s a bunch of awful shit with tons of penis jokes, random gore and the usual Japanese stigma of being unable to sit still for three seconds. If there’s a point here, I missed it. And I’m glad I did, because the idea of being in the same train of thought with the person who came up with this horseshit is not at all appealing to me! I’m sure the director had some clear intentions with all of this, but seriously – if you want to tell a story with a message, try and make it something watchable at the very least! If no one can sit through your 4-minute short film, there’s a problem there.

Aaaaaaand that’s it. ABCs of Death was…an experience, to say the least. It had its good shorts and its bad shorts, and overall even at its worst, it was never generic or rehashed like a lot of popular horror films, so there was that. It doesn’t excuse the really horrible shorts, like F, H, L, V or Z, but at least there was some kind of thought there, some kind of evidence that the directors had SOMETHING to say, even if it was done awfully. You can’t say that about The Devil Inside or Last Exorcism 2, for instance.

The good ones though? They were really good. I liked D, O, P, Q and R all very well, and several of the others were pretty cool too. These directors really stretched the boundaries of what can be done with short films. Hell, O and P were practically literary in how they expressed ideas and themes using very little of what could be called traditional filmmaking. There’s a reason film is called art, and a good filmmaker can tell a good story in a thousand different ways. There really is no rule book once you learn the basics, and the great thing about art is that you have basically unlimited ways of expressing yourself as such. Horror movies are an art too, whether the critics want to admit it or not, and some of these short films were really quite adept at expressing their themes without dialogue or a typical narrative structure. That may sound artsy to some people, and it is, but if you appreciate what movies are capable of when wielded by really creative hands, you’d do well to check some of these out. Just skip around the really bland ones.

Plus, some of the others are just funny, so there is that!

Overall, if you like movies, you’ll like at least one or two of these shorts. If you don’t like movies, WHY ARE YOU READING MY BLOG?

Also, there’s a sequel coming out next year…well, better break out the bunkers and hide.

P.S. Visit http://www.stopcrush.org/ and help put an end to crush videos! Sign the petition and report abuse if you come across it!

All images copyright of their original owners. I do not own any of them.

REVIEW: The Last Exorcism 2 (2013)

The Last Exorcism certainly was a movie. I don’t remember most of it because I fell asleep during it. But that’s okay, I still remember more of it than the people who made the sequel.

Director: Ed Gass-Donnelly

Starring: Ashley Bell

IMDb

I mean, even the title is ridiculous. The Last Exorcism was the LAST exorcism. There can’t be a Last Exorcism 2! Are you shitting me? Do you just not know the meaning of the word? If we get a Last Exorcism 3, I guess that will seal the deal. Might as well subtitle it “The Lastest of Last Exorcisms, Finally.” Or maybe just call it ‘crap.’ Well, I for one can’t like a movie in which the title so obviously contradicts any kind of logical sense. Zero stars, review over!

Well now that THAT’S over with, I can finally fulfill my dream of making a blog post solely about my favorite topic ever…men’s fashion choices in New Zealand.

You see, men’s fashions in New Zealand consist of men wearing clothes. Isn't that amazing?

What? Fine…I guess I’ll go back and do the stupid Last Exorcism 2 review…

I guess we start off with a guy in bed who thinks his wife is next to him. Because, you know, wives usually growl like rabid animals. It’s just how things go. When the wife comes in from another room though, you might as well just put a laugh track in like a stupid sitcom. It’s really about the same level of seriousness.

Yeah, you keep on sleeping there, princess. We'll go get the canned laughter and the 'cut to commercials' jingle and it'll be the perfect mode of complete worthlessness...

Also, good job on locking your doors, morons. You deserve whatever’s coming to you. Even if it’s just an animal-like girl who looks like she came out of Mama.

Another one for review? Nahh, shit was too boring. PASS!

We then switch to a little while later, where the girl they found is now the main character…awesome. Her name is Nell. And she is just about the nicest, most innocent person ever. Like, seriously, I’d feel bad if she got even the remotest bit offended at anything I said in this review. So from this point forward, I will not say anything bad about this performance or even the character. Never say that I cannot be charitable.

Her whole role in this movie seems to be making puckered-up granny faces.

Oh, wait, it’s just a character in a movie…it doesn’t actually matter if I say anything bad at all…I guess this whole detour was pointless. Just like the movie. Nell asks if she’s in Hell and the doctor replies that she’s in a New Orleans hospital. Which is, I guess, the same thing.

They decide to take her to a house for damaged girls, although none of the other girls will ever be detailed as to why they are there…in fact, it doesn’t even matter that any of these other girls are in the movie. None of them really do anything besides sit around and re-enact 5ive Girls, except without the lesbian porn. I never thought I’d say a movie would do better by taking more notes from a piece of vomited up sewage like 5ive Girls, but c’mon, if you’re going to have all these hot chicks around without any complexity or character, why bother if you’re also not going to have lesbian sex?

Some of these scenes are just odd…like, really, she doesn’t know what rock music is? When the one punk-looking chick puts some earbuds in her ears and plays some generic rock music they probably got off a radio sound editing CD, she’s about as surprised as the caveman who discovered fire. I mean really, I get it if she was some kind of uber-conservative Christian girl growing up, but to act THIS SURPRISED over what should be relatively standard music? It’s just kind of backwards.

What is this strange, magical noise? Could it be witchcraft? Perhaps the devilry of the Dark Wizard that lives in his mountain at Mordor?

Oh well. They also show her Mardi Gras! Which is really cool to her because there are pretty much no topless girls around. Kind of a minus for everyone else though, but what can you do? Then she meets the Satanic living statue – and no, I’m not joking about that. He moves creepily and says some stuff about how “they are waiting for her” or something.

Which one is wooden and which one is an actor? You choose...pretty tough, ain't it?

This scene actually is one of the better ones in the film, and works as an atmospheric and scary bit. It’s more original than a lot of the rest of the scares in the film. But at the same time it’s just kinda funny. The devil, or whatever evil this is supposed to be, recruited a living statue? And then told it to go scare her for a few seconds on the off chance she’d even come near him? What if she hadn’t come to the Mardi Gras street where he was? What if she didn’t come at all? Maybe he’d just be standing there annoyed, possessed by evil, and a living statue. That would be funny.

There’s also some kind of subplot with an old man Nell sees in the distance who she claims is her father. We don’t know if it is or not, because the movie has given us the impression that Nell lost her memory – all of it – before she was saved from the woods. So how does she recognize her father? If she remembered who her parents were, and by extension, other things about her childhood and past, why didn’t she try and contact anyone and tell them where she was? If I was found insane in the woods AND still remembered who my family was, you bet I’d tell them straight away. Maybe Nell isn’t so nice after all.

Anyway, there’s also this kid she likes from the hotel she works at. He tells her he has a “surprise” for her after work. Ladies, if a guy you barely know ever tells you this…he’s probably going to rape you. Just run the other way. But he actually takes Nell to the zoo where they sit on a bench and he asks her if she’s ever had a boyfriend. She says no but she was pregnant once – a reference to the first movie, apparently. Either way it’s pretty horrifying for a guy to hear on a first date. Guys, if a girl you barely know tells you she’s never had a boyfriend but was once pregnant, with a happy look on her face…she’s probably someone you should be very afraid of. Just saying.

A smile that says "I'll probably end up a CNN headline someday, and not for a reason my mother would be proud of."

Back at the house, the girls are all talking about who they’re dating and shit, because that’s all girls ever think about. Nell looks bored because she’s a more in-depth character than them…oh, wait, she gets a call from a boy and then isn’t bored anymore! She goes downstairs and hears some guy telling her he wants to be inside her. And that isn’t very nice, so she hangs up the phone and runs away.

The next day she decides to make out with that guy in the closet. I’m sure Freud would have something to say about this series of events… just like he would about the following scene where she puts her ear to the wall to listen to the people fucking in the next room. Then a bunch of cracks appear on the wall like a Doctor Who outtake, and we flash to later on when she’s sleeping at night. Another recurring thing in this film – whenever she’s sleeping, she goes into a trancelike state and touches her face with elaborate arm gestures like a really flamboyant street performer.

It must have taken them ten whole minutes to do that photoshop

Also seen on the cover of the latest Nora Roberts epic

Teach me your yoga O Great Contortionisto!

At one point we even get some flashes of lesbian sex after all. They’re pretty poorly shoehorned in and never spoken about or mentioned again. Maybe she just thinks it’s part of being a growing young woman.

When she goes home the next day, she gets kidnapped by her father, who is incredibly loving and caring in regards to her current demonic possession problems, and is very glad to see her…

Hmmm, now is THAT what's happening here? Sometimes my sarcasm detector is broken...

Yup, he just whips out a shotgun and points it at her fucking face…I’m starting to see why she didn’t try and contact her family when she was found. Luckily for her, punk rock chick comes down and beats him up with a vase! Only it isn’t really her at all, it’s actually the devil, who says that only THEY can have her and that her father can’t kill her!

Seriously though: what is up with these movies that do shit like this? Why would the devil just blatantly reveal himself to her like that? Why does he HAVE to be all ominous? I think it would actually be scarier if it was more ambiguous, in a Rosemary’s Baby-type way, if you didn’t know he was involved…like, maybe Nell really IS just crazy. But no, instead we get stupid ‘spooky’ scenes where the devil reveals his clear involvement with the whole thing for no reason other than to raise her paranoia…because that’s what all good villains do, right? Put you on your guard so you’ll try and find more ways to beat them? Yeah, I guess that is what they do.

After that, we get the cliché horror movie scenes of the head of the house telling Nell she’s insane and just imagining things. All I’m wondering is, how does this old man run a house with that many teenage girls and not molest any of them?

Shave the mustache, cut your hair and maybe we'll believe you.

Later on, we see the girls all watching a Youtube video of the first movie with Nell all possessed and what not, bending over backwards in her best Exorcist impression.

The Last Exorcism isn't exactly my prime pick for what to watch in the middle of the day...at least turn on something a little bit better, like paint drying, or watching cat videos on Youtube.

So somebody found that video camera out in the middle of the woods and thought “hey, better upload whatever’s on here to Youtube”? That’s just stupid. Also, this scene just goes nowhere – what was the point of it? To show that the first movie…happened? It’s not like having them watch this on Youtube really matters. These girls never show up again! This was their last scene in the movie! I guess they really just needed to remind us that this was a sequel to the first one, or else we would just forget…no, really, we would forget. Having a sequel to a shaky-cam found footage film be a regular movie is just bizarre and doesn’t make much sense in the realm of continuity.

So after that we get some more boring scenes like one where she goes into a church and starts praying. Unless this is the opening scene of Die Hard 2, I just don’t care. Some priest guy in a child-molester sweater comes out and tells her that “he’ll wait for her.” At first it seems like he’s talking about God, but uh oh, it turns out he actually means the devil! How did this guy get a job at a church then? They should review their hiring policy. Maybe add some more background checks. Also, wouldn’t the crosses and holy water be directly anathema to the devil’s whole gig and make him recoil in horror or something?

Never trust a man dressed like that if you're a girl and all alone in a secluded place. Man, two child molestation jokes in one review? Talk about NSFW.

Oh, who cares. The next scene involves a fat guy with no life bothering Nell for a picture with him because he saw the video on Youtube. Why would he want a picture, and how would he even recognize her? I dunno, I’m just amazed he follows her for as long as he does. It’s seriously to “stalker” levels of harassment. She yells at him to fuck off, which is a very justifiable response. Then some black lady grabs her arm and tells her to come with her. Gee. Would Nell also believe it if a fat guy in a trenchcoat opened the side door of a white van and told her there was free candy inside?

I just kind of like this picture. If anyone cares, the guy walks off and dies for some reason afterward. I don't really think anyone in the movie's universe cares that he died, though, so anyone in our world caring is kinda a stretch...

But yeah, this lady is…just a random New Orleans black woman, which means of course she’s into voodoo and all sorts of other stereotypical, racist bullshit. If she had a real character it wouldn’t matter, but her whole function in this movie is to help out the milquetoast white girl main character, so it’s pretty much just lazy as all hell writing. I think if you’re going to write stuff like this into your movie, you might as well admit to living in the 1800s in your mind.

"We're from Louisiana, all we do is sit around with turbans on our heads and breathe in the marijuana smoke from some elaborate bong..." 

She puts Nell in a trance and tells her to “tell her what she sees.” Nell is attacked by demons and starts screaming as the lights flicker on and off and some kind of miniature tornado starts. The whole thing is just so stupid because the voodoo lady keeps on shouting at Nell to tell her what she sees, the whole time! Lady, I think we’re a bit past that once the background noises is so loud that you have to shout over it.

Things calm down again and then Nell goes to see her stupid boyfriend, who’s been possessed by the devil and who slits his throat. Because she’s a good person, she doesn’t call the police or even try to notify any of that kid’s family or anything. Oh, did I say she does that because she’s a good person? I meant because she’s a horrible person! God. Maybe being possessed by the devil isn’t much of a stretch for her after all. I can see why Hell wants her back.

Anyway, back at racist stereotype voodoo lady’s house, we get introduced to these two guys, who are apparently our Ghostbusters of the film. One of them looks like he just came from a cage fight, and the other like he just came from an accounting job. Truly these guys are the most qualified to help! And no, we never get an explanation of who they are.

"We're the bargain bin Ghostbusters! She just found us at a bar half-drunk and high on coke...uh, ahem, I mean we were on an important case. Yeah. That's it."

The cage fighter guy puts these little nodes on Nell’s chest and back, and then they strap her down to a table and – sigh – reenact The Exorcist.

Yeah, you sprinkle that shit on the floor and hook her up to those machines and recite words out of a Bible; that ALWAYS works out in EVERY movie they do it in! It's never gone wrong!

What are you giving birth or something? Stop it. These facial expressions are too much.

Why do movies think scenes like these are still interesting? They’re not. Not when you have the same old crap every time…you have the shouting and the demonic forces and stuff falling and making noise all over the place. It’s just contrite. You could practically exchange the dialogue with this scene from any number of scenes in The Devil Inside. There’s nothing original about it and I seriously have a hard time imagining someone in today’s pop-culture obsessed world finding this in any way entertaining. Like what you want, but I’m just saying – how could you watch this and not go “hmm, this reminds me of The Exorcist only without the interesting characters and religious subtext”? What’s the draw? What’s the point?

There are some notable differences in the formula this time though - not in what happens; that's still horseshit, but in the little things. The minute details that make this so acutely funny when you stop and think. Like how their big plan is to transfer the evil spirit thing into, get this, A FUCKING CHICKEN.

He prefers to go by Herbert, or Master of All Living Things. Either one.

Yeah, real great idea there! The icing on the cake is a line by one of our bargain bin Ghostbusters: "The chicken won't feel any pain." Oh, thanks for telling me that. Lord knows, if the CHICKEN felt pain, I'd just keep the demon inside me forever. But now it's okay.

Also, how about the devil's choice in forms to take? He only seems to like turning into teenagers with baggy pants and bland, label-less clothing - he turns into the boyfriend and also into this weird kid with a Mardi Gras mask:

He takes off his mask later and it's actually Nell again. Ooh, symbolism...shut up Last Exorcism 2, go sit in the corner.

I think the best part is when they fail to get the demon out of her and then just decide it’s okay to kill her. It’s like, what the hell? If you’re going to trust people to tie you down to where you can’t move your arms or legs, it would probably be a good idea to reconsider how trusting you are to strangers. Seriously, they just give up! It’s like “welp, we didn’t get the demon out of her on the first try…time to kill her.” These guys have got to be the worst exorcists ever! Did that voodoo lady find them at the dollar store?

How would you like it if doctors acted like that? “Hmm, well, we couldn’t fix this person’s tumor with the first thing we tried. Oh well. Sally, put a lethal dose of morphine in her IV. She’s better off dead now anyway.”

Anyway, I guess she gives her life to the devil after all and is free to kill everyone in cartoonish ways, and go driving around a burning city in a cartoonish way. Yeah, this ending may as well have been written for a daytime Nickelodeon kids TV show. I mean come on, the way you pan out to the front of the house and then the guy just falls out the window? The driving with that stupid metal soundtrack playing? It’s hilarious.

This movie is just a mess. With the numerous characters and plot points that just get dropped halfway through, it feels unfinished and most likely was the victim of some heavy editing in post-production. It’s not the worst ever and there are a few scary moments, and a couple funny ones. Most of it is just lame though. I mean seriously, just lame – too much cliché, too little actual engaging ideas. This whole exorcism/possession trend is seriously the worst. I could write a script for one of these movies and get it green-lighted – anyone could! Don’t waste your money on this or The Conjuring, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Rite, The Possession, The Devil Inside or any of these films…go see something with more artistic merit!

Oh, I'm sorry, was my saying that too critical and snooty-sounding? Should I just accept movies the way they are and never criticize anything ever again, for fear of offending someone, anyone, anywhere on the Earth? Okay. Let me go put a rod up my ass and start on that right away.

Images in this review copyright of their original owners, I do not own any of them.