Accidental Exorcist (2016)

Accidental Exorcist, the final film Sector 5 Films sent me to review, is really just a wonder of a movie in that there's absolutely nothing appealing about it. Oftentimes, it feels more like some sort of strange hallucinatory drug dream, and not in a good way. This is a woeful film and after watching it, I just can't see much to recommend about it.

Director: Daniel Falicki

Starring: Daniel Falicki, Faye Sills

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

Check out that DVD cover! Never seen a screaming demonic girl with whited-out eyes on the DVD cover of a horror movie before! What a unique idea!

The whole thing, I guess, is about this lousy, drunk, sick-looking guy named Vanuk who is supposed to be some sort of exorcist. He's really just a sad sack, irritable and kind of a loser. He looks like he has a freezer full of severed heads at home, and I don't mean that as a compliment.

He goes around doing 'healing' on people apparently possessed by demons, which is immediately unbelievable, as I can't imagine these families letting some dude with fucking fingerless gloves and drinking out of a hip flask alone with their sick children. If someone's drinking from a hip flask and has fingerless gloves, they're probably living under the awning of a barber shop and stealing cash from church rectories. They shouldn't be trusted to perform an exorcism. Just go to the real Catholic church like everyone else in these kinds of films. I mean, come on, the economy isn't that bad these days.

I usually like to go into detail about scenes in chronological order, but I can't do that with this movie, as for one it's far too repetitive, and two, I usually had no idea what the fuck was happening at any point. From what I can gather, he heals people who are possessed, and then the demons sort of enter him, making him sick and depressed. But tonally, it's just all over the place – some scenes feel like they're trying to be a dark comedy, and others are more like a dark-tortured-soul-seeking-redemption thing. There's no consistency. This movie is the young child mixing peanut butter and mayonnaise of horror films – it's completely incongruous with anything that makes sense.

I'll go into depth on this one scene: he goes to this family who hired him because their clearly obese, mentally incompetent adult son won't eat anything, but apparently that was an indicator that he's possessed, and not just that you can't cook worth a damn and this is probably child abuse of some sort.

But their insane logic proves true, as he IS possessed. The guy has a harness around his head and when they take it off, he bites his teeth down over and over again like a chattering monkey doll. But for some reason, when they try to spoon-feed him, he closes his mouth and won't let it happen. I know all of these pointless details because the movie shows it to you and repeats it multiple times.

Watching this scene, I really just reconsider if making this blog was ever a good idea. Is this what my life has become? What a bizarre scene. I just don't know what to say about it, or what it was trying to accomplish.

The medical care guy watching the man makes a big fuss about not leaving like Vanuk wants, but then Vanuk basically goes “come onnnnnnn,” and they stare at each other and then the caregiver leaves. What a riveting conversation. And I'm sure that guy's job is so worth being smug over and protecting like he's watching after a fucking United States President, right? Why was he being so adamant about staying for like a whole two seconds?

"I'LL DEFEND MY JOB TO THE DEATH... until you stare at me for a few seconds."

What follows is basically an incomprehensible fight scene in which the movie rips off The Exorcist shamelessly by having the guy talk in Vanuk's mom's voice or something, and then they start throwing food at each other and wrestling. It's beyond bizarre. I can't even say it's so bad it's good – it's just weird and I don't know how to feel or what to say about it. Sometimes, art is good when you don't know how to feel immediately. This is not one of those times.

Oh, and the movie does rip off The Exorcist pretty hard. The opening credit scene even rips it off with as much shame as a slacker high schooler copying his friends' answers and forgetting to put his own name on the homework.

If he walks into the letters, I'd do a mea culpa and admit this is a good movie and I was wrong.

Most of the whole movie is just like that one scene – gibberish, and much less coherent than the scene I described. I picked that scene because I could at least sort of tell what was supposed to be happening in a cogent sequence of events – not the case in the rest of the film. Most of it is a sloppy mish-mash of the guy drunk stumbling around and then some other acid-trip scenes of him performing “exorcisms.” There's no point in going through it like I usually would. The pacing is really off, too – the scenes vary in length so much that it gives the movie a kind of weird, off-balance feel, which could be good for a better movie. Here, it mostly just felt overlong and directionless.

Multiple times, the film fades to black on moments that seem sort of like the movie just ended, but then it comes back up with more, like the world's biggest cock tease. I was halfway convinced that the movie would never end and was being filmed on a live video feed somewhere, just going on and on as some sort of endurance test, maybe for prisoners of ISIS or something.

I was really just surprised it took over an hour for them to rip off The Exorcist in the most obvious way – having someone's head facing backward. That must have taken some restraint!

The film ends, and it doesn't really matter how – something about him going crazy, stripping naked and smashing everything in his apartment, then going to Hell. I don't really want or need to look much further into what this is supposed to mean. The movie didn't engage me on a level enough to try. Sorry, I guess.

People, I'm all for artists expressing themselves and all of that shit. This movie clearly wanted to do something kind of abstract and weird, but it didn't work at all. This was just nonsense, and there wasn't much to get from it at all. I appreciate any honest effort to make something good, but that's the only good thing I have to say about this movie.

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