Insidious Chapter 2 (2013)

The first Insidious was a pretty decent horror film, but it was made more entertaining than it had any right to be because of the production value, the special effects and the general zeal and energy it had when it pulled off even the most generic jump scares. It blended some classic horror style imagery and tropes into the modern style, and overall was a cut above the usual modern horror crap we get most of the time. So how much do you want to bet the sequel is pointless, lame and has no reason to exist?

Director: James Wan

Starring: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne

IMDb

There was no reason to make a sequel to Insidious. It was actually a solid horror film on its own and didn’t need any kind of explanation or elaboration of the story. But, hey, that’s the modern filmmaker’s bible: the audience is stupid. The audience doesn’t understand subtlety and can’t read between the lines. And most importantly, the audience needs every little detail of the story explained to them like a Kindergarten teacher reading Clifford the Big Red Dog – there’s no room for mystery, intrigue and all the other things that make up actual horror! WE NEED EXPLANATIONS!

Basically the directors of movies like Insidious Chapter 2 think the audiences are all like this:

So with that said, anyone else ready to take a plunge knee-deep into some of the lamest modern horror you’ll come across? Yeah me neither. But hey, fuck it, you know?

We start off with a flashback of main character Josh as a kid, showing how he got possessed by spirits when he was a kid and that lady Elise came to help him the first time. They do some kind of weird overly complicated set-up where he shows her where the evil spirits are by communicating via walkie-talkie as she walks around the house. He seems to get the most distressed when she approaches the closet in his bedroom. Probably because he has a porn stash in there.

"Oh my, look at these copies of Bestiality Monthly I found under here! I've been looking for these for ages!"

So I guess it plays out exactly like we heard at the end of the first film – they beat the demons and save Josh, who goes on to live a perfectly boring life until the events of the first movie. Snore. Why did we need this scene? Because without showing every painstaking detail, nobody would understand the movie’s clear genius.

Anyway, back in the modern day, we see the aftermath of the first movie: Elise is dead and the police don’t investigate very seriously at all the fact that she died in these peoples’ house and nobody knows who killed her. I mean, I guess we get one scene where the wife Renai is being questioned by Sergeant Doakes from Dexter for a second:

But other than that, what the hell? How is their house not swarmed with cops? How are they all not immediately locked up in interrogation rooms questioned for hours by the toughest cops the bureau has? I guess old ladies’ lives rank low on the police’s list of priorities. Anyway, we get some boring scenes where Renai questions Josh about what happened, but because this shitty ass movie needs an excuse to keep existing, these scenes are downplayed. God knows, the movie world would just be at a loss if we didn’t have the ensuing hour of dead-eyed supernatural boredom to wade through.

I mean, think of the possibilities otherwise – character development? An interesting moment? Something that actually furthers the story rather than just chucking more exposition at us? THE HORROR!

There’s also these two asswipes; the comedic duo from the first film who served as a sort of foil to the seriousness of the rest of it – they’re some kind of paranormal investigators or something. Give them credit for not being like the investigators in every other movie, but they’re just as bad in a different way. Here they find a videotape in Elise’s old house and put it into the machine. Oh, good, will we get a shitty horror-comedy anthology with aludicrous “wrap around” segment now?

No? Oh well. I must’ve gotten the wrong terrible sequel in 2013.

I guess what we do get is the revelation that Elise once had this other guy she worked with named Carl, or some shit like that – a flimsy plot device used to bring someone with some kind of credibility into the story, because otherwise no-one would know anything. So this guy is some kind of psychic or something, and he knows almost as much about the whole “Further” concept as Elise did. I guess he rolls some dice and that lets him talk to Elise from beyond the grave almost immediately:

This guy must be really good at Scrabble.

What is this, Dungeons and Dragons? Get a life. I’d find it hilarious if the dice accidentally spelled out something randomly while Elise was still thinking of a response. Like if they were asking “how do we beat these evil spirits?” And then the dice just came up with “Cat” completely at random. Would this become Public Enemy #1?

Man, I don’t even know. Most of the first hour of this is so boring, I have to make up completely ridiculous scenarios to even sit through it. What am I supposed to grasp onto otherwise; scenes of Renai hearing creepy noises at night and jumping? One of those times it’s at a glow-in-the-dark baby stroller:

The epitome of terror.

I can just feel my eyelids growing heavier and my brain getting number. Jesus, this is fucking boring. What happened to the manic energy of the first one? That movie was on fire half the time. In even its most generic moments, it felt big and immediate, not letting the viewer fall asleep or get bored. This one is on Valium. It’s just no comparison.

So what, there’s some scenes where they meander around in this old-ass hospital looking for clues? It doesn’t really matter how they get there; the reasoning is so convoluted you’ll go crazy trying to decipher it … something about how this old man grabbed Josh’s arm as a kid and then died the next day.

His mother saw him in the elevator anyway though, even after he died, and then re-enacted the old cliché “I just saw him in the elevator!” “But he died last night!” thing. Usually it’s a good cliché. Here it’s not … after his mom finds out the guy was dead, she just walks away without questioning anything at all, and nobody stops her. I guess they were just used to her spouting random insanities.

Somehow this leads them to the old mental hospital, where they find an old newspaper clipping about five minutes into their search about the “Black Bride,” a serial killer from years and years ago. Within like, a few scenes, they figure out the truth: the Black Bride was actually some weirdo whose mom made him dress up like a girl, and then forced him to kill people for her. Why? Shits and giggles.

Hell, make these guys heads of the detective department! I’m sure we would all benefit from their mental wizardry. Truly they are the master sleuths of the modern age; figuring out decades-old murder cases without even trying. It’s almost like the movie was completely phoned-in in every aspect imaginable, as this clearly is so far removed from reality that you could just label it a fan-fiction, actually.

Most of these flashback scenes are so badly acted, I can’t even tell you. It’s like watching one of those satirical horror movies where everyone overreacts on purpose, but this is supposed to be 100% played straight. There’s a truly horrible scene sometime later where we see a flashback of the killer as a kid while his mom shouts at him cartoonishly for drawing a picture in school with his real name on it, instead of the “girl” name she gave him.

This scene brought to you from the bowels of Tim Burton's subconscious.

This is, no joke, one of the worst things I’ve seen on film at all in recent years – up there with the Kick-Ass 2 “vomit and diarrhea device” scene. How a well-known director like James Wan put this shit on screen is beyond me. I mean I knew he wasn’t great, but c’mon, I expected something that wasn’t … this!

Ugh, Jesus, so I guess everyone starts to guess that Josh isn’t really Josh, but some kind of spirit possessing his body after the end of the first movie. Carl goes in to try and do something I guess, though really since they already know, it seems like there’d be some kind of better plan … I guess not. He gets stabbed with a knife after an overly long “taunting” scene, and then ends up in purgatory with the real Josh, who fortunately has a lantern to help guide him through his aimless “doing nothing” adventures.

"You mean I can actually do things to further a plot?"

Yeah – that’s right. He’s spent the whole time since the end of the first movie just aimlessly wandering around “trying to get out.” He says some bullshit about how he’s been weaker and weaker ever since, but he seems fine to me, so I dunno. I guess he’s just a complete pussy.

So if you were wondering how much further down the bunker-hole of cliché this movie could possibly burrow, we actually get the inevitable return of Elise in ghost forum. I shit you not, she actually says the following line:

"I've seen that better place, but I came back here because I heard you calling, and I think I can help."

Really. You’ve seen the other side, and you still chose to come back and help these two morons. You could have been sipping wine up there on golden thrones with singing cherubs all around you, and you came back. You could have been fine dining with dead celebrities and artists, and you’re here schmaltzing it up in the name of the whoredom that is modern horror cinema. You goddamned sap. Are you even serious … did you read the script? YOU COULD HAVE BEEN LIVING IT UP WITH THE CREATOR OF MANKIND. 72 VIRGINS. ETERNAL PARADISE. WHATEVER YOU WANT. And you’re doing this.

Jesus. So I guess she tells them to go toward the light – hey, why be original now? I guess we get some boring scenes where they go back in time and try to warn their past selves of the demons, or some shit like that. It comes off like a weak-assed version of the Christmas Carol story. Did we really need Scrooge done up by the Casper ghosts? Because that’s about where you’re at. I mean, Doctor Who's latter-day Christmas specials are more plausible.

Back in the real world, possessed Josh decides to take a different path to parenting than his children have perhaps been used to. I like to call it ‘traumatizing 101.’ He strangles her and what not, and I guess anything’s better at this point than the flashback scenes. Sad my standards’ve gotten so low.

We'll start a journalistic expose: From the Spiritual Other Dimension to the therapy chair.

But then they’re saved by the comedy relief:

Brilliant … just brilliant. We get some stupid scenes that I think James Wan confused with his next foray into mainstream pandering, The 40 Year Old Virgin 2: The 40 Year Old Haunting, Because It’s Been Done for 40 Years Now. What I’m trying to say with that is, having a scene where the goofy comic relief idiot busts through the door attempting to look badass right after the climax is over … is a poor way to try and elicit laughs.

*straightens bow-tie*

This movie sucks. There’s nothing about it that’s in any way interesting, except how humorously awful it can be. While it isn’t the worst out there, the writing is a complete mess of cliché and the story is just pointless. So what, the whole first movie happened because some serial killer’s mom made him wear a dress as a kid? Get fucked, movie. I mean, isn’t it just obvious? Isn’t THAT just so apparent to you while watching the first one? With all its subtle hints? Oh wait, there were no hints because you made all of this up on the spot to get more money. Insidious 2 is just a giant piece of shit.

And what’s this? Another scene after the movie ends where the two comic relief jackasses go to some house and ask about a girl? The girl’s father gets defensive, but the younger daughter asks who the woman is behind them – and lo and behold it’s Ghost Elise, because she has no other purpose in life but to be a supernatural slave to these two bungholes because they can’t tie their own shoes. She goes upstairs, sees something scary that the audience can’t see aaaaaand that’s the end. What did she see? My guess is, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

Frankly, I can sum up this movie's attitude towards death with one video clip:

Thank you, Matt and Trey. Insidious 2 is nothing but a commercial cash in and you are part of the fuckin’ problem if you liked this one. I hope anyone who saw this in theaters took it upon themselves to go out, after the film was released to DVD, to their local Targets or Walmarts, took the DVDs and burned them right there in the fucking aisles. Because really, the DVD cover isn’t representative of what this soulless film actually contains. Let me show you what it really is:

That’s more like it.

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

REVIEW: V/H/S 2 (2013)

While the first V/H/S wasn’t anything intellectual, it was a fun anthology horror flick that called back to the 80s and pulled off some interesting twists with the handheld-cam format. There was a lot of energy and it was a great flick to sit back and drink a beer to. So how about we make a sequel with a bunch of short films that play like outtakes from the first collection? It’s more like the table scraps of the first V/H/S rather than a legit sequel. Let’s just get this shit over with.

Directors: Simon Barrett, Jason Eisener, Gareth Evans, Gregg Hale, Eduardo Sanchez, Timo Tjahjanto, Adam Wingard

Starring: Lawrence Michael Levine, Kelsey Abbot, various others for the other shorts

IMDb

So yeah, we start this off with some idiot filming people having sex in a motel. He gets caught by the cleaning lady and, at this point I realize it’s how the director of this film made excuses to his probation officer. “I wasn’t making a porno! Uh, look, I spliced in some of my friends’ homemade horror movies! It’s art! IT’S ART!!!”

We then get introduced to our main character Larry, played by Lawrence Michael Levine. Heh…yeah, I’m real sure him playing a character with an abbreviated version of his own name was such a stretch. He’s going to some house with his girlfriend Ayesha, where they’re being paid, I guess, to look into the disappearance of some kid. Larry says that “the cops wouldn’t care about some missing college kid” – heh heh, well you’re of course completely wrong and stupid, but okay. They get to the house and the girlfriend decides to sit down and watch some videos…

Badger from Breaking Bad, noooooo!

Yeah, apparently that’s supposed to be the kid they’re looking for. So what, the first movie had a relatively simple, unobtrusive wrap-around story about crooks finding some dead guy’s house with a bunch of evil videotapes. This one has a stupid hipster looking kid who probably just smoked too much weed and passed out in the basement reading Ayn Rand.

The first story we get is about some guy who’s getting a new bionic eye with a camera in it after an accident. Pretty interesting set-up. I do think it’s pretty stupid that they apparently waited until AFTER they put the damn thing in his head to tell him that they’d be watching his every move. The NSA's latest master plan! I can't wait for someone to blow the whistle on this one and then spend the next several months globe-hopping the world. Eh. Personally I’d take looking like the cover of a bottle of Captain Morgan over having a bunch of old perverts watch me take a shit every morning.

So he goes home and immediately begins to see ghosts everywhere, turning this into a low-rent version of The Shining. Probably still more enjoyable than Stephen King’s 1990s TV remake though. All I can think is how jealous I am that this douchebag has such a nice place, though:

Seriously, what the hell? What does this guy do? Is he some kind of rocket scientist? My guess is he’s probably just some rich kid who never bothered to come out from the shadow of his parents’ checkbook.

I guess the ghosts begin to freak him out until this one chick shows up at his door. She comes inside, demands a beer and then tells our main character that she has a cochlear implant that allows her to hear ghosts. If that isn’t stupid enough for you, just take a look at her idea of how to “cure” seeing all these ghosts:

Yup, her way of getting rid of the ghosts is to take off her shirt and fuck the main character, because…well, I’m guessing the director was forced to put some cheap tits in the movie just in case the audience was getting bored in the long gap between the last tit shot and this one. What a great reason to put something in a movie. Oh, did I say great? I meant cheap and useless.

“But wait,” you may be claiming, “what if it’s done for story purposes?” Well, just take a look at how well that idea worked to ward off those pesky ghosts…

...she's supposed to be drowning there, if you couldn't tell.

Yeah, the ghosts start killing them almost immediately after they finish having sex. Isn’t that just amazing? We see the main guy finally get fed up with it all and cut the eye out of his head. It doesn’t help though, and the ghosts kill him anyway. What a happy ending.

I figured out later that this guy is actually director Adam Wingard, who had nothing to do with writing this segment. He also did some good shit with the first V/H/S and made one of the best segments on ABCs of Death - keep up the good work, dude; you are cool.

Back in wrap-around land, Larry tells Ayesha to keep on looking through the tapes so the film can keep going. Oops, I mean “in case they find something about the missing kid.” Uh huh. Sure.

Next we get a story about some guy with a bike helmet cam for absolutely no reason, telling his girlfriend how much he enjoys riding around in nature in the morning. Of course we then see him truly enjoying nature by riding his bike to the tune of loud, disjointed electronic dance music – there is no greater way to show man’s connection to nature! None!

Then he gets turned into a zombie by some chick with a serious biting fixation. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a zombie movie told from the POV of one of the zombies? No? Well too bad.

Then they crash a birthday party. Oh no, some guy that looks like The Rock isn’t too happy that zombies crashed his kid’s party!

What are you doing with that truck? All I wanted was a slice of cake! Stop it! No! Noooooooooooo----

Oh okay, so he survives that too. He gets a call from his girlfriend which reminds him of all that he’s lost. So then we get the first ever on-screen zombie suicide. Geez, right after the first robot suicide the other day! Isn’t the world such a bizarre place?

Back in wrap-around palooza, Larry finds Ayesha with her nose bleeding and says something about how they left her medication at home. Because it’s such a great idea to leave her all alone in a house full of creepy video tapes where a kid may or may not have died, he does exactly that, going to find her some medicine at the nearest drug store. She pops in the next tape.

And okay, so this one, “Safe Haven” is the one most talked about in this entire collection. I gotta level with you though. It’s really not that good. I know people like this one quite a bit, but I don’t know. To me it just comes off as a long, boring, self-indulgent trudge. But far be it from me to get ahead of myself; no no – let’s go through this whole thing step by step. Get your pill boxes and glasses of wine ready. You’ll need ‘em.

So it’s about a bunch of journalists, I think, after some story about a weird Indonesian religious cult. They talk to their leader at a café and find out that yes, he really is every single cliché you could think of with a character and plot like this. Mousy little dude talking crazy about how there is a literal afterlife to which he will lead his followers like sheep across a valley? Check. All that’s missing is anything of interest.

So they convince him that they’re REALLY OBJECTIVE JOURNALISTS, and yes that does need to be in all caps, and so they can come into his crazy temple of insanity and film shit. And that’s what they do. Even though right away they set about showing exactly why they’re not objective by asking questions about why everything is so crazy. But how can you blame them when the little girls at this place talk about how this cult leader guy is actually just a creepy pedophile? It’s not like there’s anything to be said for actually being truthful and just showing no bias when doing a report like this, right? Fuck it. We need to show off how morally superior we are!

So objective. You're the master of journalism.

Hell, most of these bungholes don’t even stick closely to the interviewing for long enough for it not to devolve into a soap opera. Two of them go outside and end up arguing about how they got pregnant even though the girl is with one of the other guys in the crew. Isn’t this just the perfect place to argue about this shit? And oh yeah, we gotta have the fucking camera on when arguing about it, just so the guy the chick is actually dating can overhear them while out getting some batteries! Hey, weren’t we making a movie about an evil religious cult? Nah, that was too fucking boring. The soap opera shit, though; THAT’S where the money is! Genius filmmaking.

"You're just mad because I'm an exact replica of M. Night Shyamalan!!!"

That’s the thing, too – the first V/H/S mostly stuck to one camera to tell the stories, resulting in some very clever set-ups. This one has multiple cameras and switches between them like a regular movie would. So what’s the point? The only interesting aspect of the style of the first V/H/S film was the one-camera element. Without that, it’s just a bunch of hackneyed shit. Are you seriously telling me that these people all died horribly and bloodily and then some asshole took the time to splice together the footage from their cameras into one home movie? Give me a break.

So yeah, the whole place just goes insane and turns into a really lame haunted house ride, like something you’d see at Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights. The one stoner moron of the group is stuck with crazy religious psycho while he pauses the interview to begin the apocalypse.

No, seriously. He begins the fucking apocalypse. He says some magic voodoo horseshit over the loudspeaker and then everything goes crazy. When stoner moron tries to interrupt, crazy religious psycho doesn’t like that, and rips off his shirt and stabs the guy in the throat on camera, just like that.

The Hangover did it better.

That’s the other thing with this story. Were they just planning to do this all along, even if the journalists did remain objective and treated them fairly? What’s the point of even having these people even come in if you’re just going to kill everyone, even your own followers, that same day at apparently a very specific time? “Hey, this is our judgment day in which hell will take over the Earth, but I think I’ll invite some stupid kids with cameras in!” It’d be one thing if this was some kind of elaborate set-up, but it’s not – at the beginning of this mess, the crazy religious guy was reluctant to let them in because the media usually portrays the religious cult in a negative light. SO WHAT THE HELL IS THE LOGIC OF PROVING THEM RIGHT? Isn’t going insane and stabbing people exactly the kind of negative stigma you didn’t want? There’s really no way of making this logical in any form. There’s no excuse.

It’s just so odd of a time frame – this is the day we’re going to end the world and kill ourselves; let’s invite journalists to do a TV interview? What if the journalists had scheduled things a day later? What would the crazy religious cult’s calendar look like then?

But hey, fuck it, who needs things that make sense? Let’s have a bunch of guys shoot themselves for no reason.

That's just what (insert Indonesian stereotype here) does to you after too long! PS, I apologize in advance to the country of Indonesia.

And let’s have an execution-style lineup that one of the main characters stumbles upon, and the guy just lets him live for no reason – or just because the film needs to drag on and on forever.

And I mean it DRAGS. This thing never seems to end! I’ve watched two and a half hour films that go by faster than this! Ugh, so what, they strapped the pregnant girl to a table and let her give birth to a demonic black goat? How utterly unexpected! Maybe she wasn't just cheating on her fiance. Maybe she she had some, erm, extracurricular interests in terms of who she was sleeping with on those lonely week-nights...

What happens on the farm, stays on the farm.

Some other shit happens, but who really cares? I don’t. Next scene.

Back in Everybody Loves Wrap-around, Larry returns and finds Ayesha unconscious on the floor. Being a genius, he of course shouts for help in the house they’ve broken into; the one that has already been established to be empty. I’m sure that will do you plenty of good, you imbecile. So then he takes her to the hospital and saves her life.

"Hmm...nah, I don't really care. I feel like watching some movies!"

HA HA! Just kidding, he sits down and watches another videotape. What a worthless piece of crap he is. There are no words for how much I don't understand any of this right now.

But hey, at least the next short is so stupid it will numb your brain to any perceived inconsistency in the wrap-around’s plot…

You know what was wrong with the rest of this movie? The camera work was too visible. It wasn’t nauseating and shaky enough to make you feel like you were trapped in a dice box in a game of Dungeons and fucking Dragons or something. I’m so glad the final short decided to rectify those mistakes!

This one is about…aliens or something. There isn’t much to be said for it because not a lot happens. Bunch of kids play pranks on each other like a rejected 1980s comedy sequel, and then aliens show up and kill them. Some of this could have been effective, as they have a nice setting and the colors and lighting are pretty cool. But you can never actually SEE anything going on – it just becomes a bunch of shaky-cam nonsense, making Cloverfield and [REC] look like masterpieces of calculated and well-paced cinema.

Jesus, this is annoying. And the wrap around segment ends with that kid Larry and Ayesha were trying to find becoming a zombie and, I guess, killing them or something. He gives a goofy thumbs up and then a crappy punk rock song plays over the credits.

You know, I think that last bit sums up the movie; it really does. The first one, while campy, at least didn’t have any outright silly moments like this, practically winking to the audience in that lame self-aware mode. Horror got lame when that kind of thing was introduced. And the ending of this one sums up the entire tone – jokey, hokey and lame as hell.

I mean, OK, it’s not unwatchable or anything. Despite its problems, there was still actual effort put into this, even if it seems pretty minimal overall to me. But it’s just so weak. The writing is a pretty half-assed attempt at horror comedy, and while it’s not all bad or anything, it’s not very good either, coming off as insecure and insincere – these kinds of “self aware” horror comedies always seem like the makers would be embarrassed to be caught watching any of the movies they’re parodying.

The only exception is “Safe Haven,” which isn’t goofy at all, rather just boring, poorly written and overly long, riddled with plot holes the size of minivans. It’s just a piece of shit. I know people like it and all, but I really can’t get behind that one at all.

Well, that's V/H/S 2. Aren't you just looking forward to the endless run of less and less interesting and well produced sequels in the next few years? Ugh. I'm just going to bury my head in the sand now, and pretend the first one was a stand-alone film.

Images copyright of their original owners.

REVIEW: The Exorcist (1973)

If I had a nickel for every demonic possession movie that came out these last five years or so, I’d be rich enough to make sure there was never another one. I mean honestly. What subset of movies has been sucked dry more than this? Let's just take a look at some of these wonderfully creative films which have so much of their own ideas...

 

...and the list goes on. It’s gone beyond beating a dead horse and more into beating a dead horse with the flogged carcass of another dead horse, while sitting on a third dead horse. Where does it end? Where did it begin?

Well, we can answer the second question.

Director: William Friedkin

Starring: Linda Blair, Ellen Burstyn

IMDb

Yes, The Exorcist, often touted as one of the scariest movies ever made. And rightly so. It’s a masterpiece. It is one of the most richly textured horror films out there, as much a drama as it is a horror film really. But at the same time, it also packs some of the blackest, vilest depths of evil you will ever see in a film. But to truly understand this masterpiece of cinema, we must call a priest and have him cast out everything from the movie so we can examine it.

The movie begins slowly, with an old man out in Iraq discovering some mysterious artifacts that remind him of something long-past that we don’t know about yet. We get some quiet build-ups that really just establish his character and the hesitation he’s going through. We fade out on a shot of him standing in the desert against a demonic shadow figure.

Pretty damn effective and ominous.

Then we get our main characters, Regan and Chris, who are both women born in that strange ambiguous time when men and womens’ names seemed to be interchangeable. Chris is an actress and spends her time trying to make her hairdo as gender-ambiguous as her name. When she’s not doing that, she hangs out with her British director, Burke Dennings, and plays with Regan in the evenings. Regan has made a new invisible friend named Captain Howdy, who I think used to hang out with the Devil’s Rejects cast before this movie.

Another difference between then and now: parents would immediately become suspicious in 2013 if their little girls started saying they were hanging out with Captain Howdy.

So the movie unfolds pretty slow and comfortably, taking its time to set up its characters. Shit – most modern movies would have had about twenty jump scares at this point. Some people might confuse this kind of pacing as sluggish, but I like it. It sets up everything very well and you get to like the characters pretty well. We get introduced to our other main character in Father Damien Karras, a priest in the city losing his faith while his ailing mother passes away under the gaze of uncaring relatives.

Here’s another thing this does so well – it really does a good job with those scenes of people trying to figure out what’s wrong with Regan. To start with, there really isn’t much of a transition into her getting sick. We get introduced to the character, she seems okay, and after we return from some of the Father Karras scenes, she’s just in the hospital – bam. No other explanation needed. I love how we find out a lot of the stuff wrong with her just through Chris talking with the doctors. There are no goofy over the top jump scares and no bullshit mythos – it’s all very grounded in reality at first, which is really the way to go. Unfortunately these days, we are so over-saturated with these kinds of stories and we have the Internet to contend with, so it wouldn’t be believable quite as much to have a scene like this in, say, The Last Exorcism III: The Dead Horse.

In The Exorcist though, we get some very good, detailed scenes of hard-working doctors trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with Regan. There are some expensive medical treatments and some very uncomfortable scenes. The film, again, takes its time. Remember in my Paranormal Activity review when I said research isn’t scary? This is the exception.

The reason is because it’s all so slowly built up – the film crawls toward its point by establishing that the characters really have no other options to turn to. Chris is pushed to her breaking point and simply cannot find any other explanation except the supernatural. She becomes so desperate that she ends up accepting the one thing she never thought she would: demonic forces from another plane of existence.

"Hmmm...my diagnosis is, you're fucked."

That’s really, really good, actually. If you’ve never seen this movie before, let me go back and explain a bit – in the middle of the research scenes where the doctors are puzzled about what’s wrong with Regan, one of the doctors asks if she or Regan has any religious beliefs. Chris replies that no, neither one of them do. Which would be a fairly commonplace thing nowadays – many people are atheists now and it’s not something to be ashamed of. Most people don’t even blink at that. But this was the 70s, when we as a country were just starting to come out of the long shadow of the Church and of religion in general. It was a confusing, transitional time and people were moving away from the old guard of religious beliefs – the world was changing.

And that’s the cincher right there – that’s why this movie is so scary. Because it takes a woman who, by all accounts is rational and modernistic in this world, and shows her that really, everything we know as sophisticated, civilized and modern is just a bunch of shit. Really, the old world never left and it never will leave – the old world is eternal and the Devil is real. That’s fuckin’ terrifying, man. That’s the pitch blackest horror there is. The Exorcist takes our changing, atheistic and unchristian world and turns it upside down.

The expression on their faces sums up the movie for me: pure fear masked by a shaky confidence in science and manmade inventions, even though what lies beneath the Earth is about to take over. Terrifying.

So yeah, I guess I should talk about the Regan devil-possession scenes…they’re pretty damned gross. I don’t think these scenes by themselves are anything that scary as much as they are disturbing. I mean, especially if you don’t like people vomiting up green bile. In that case, don’t watch Troll 2. You’ll probably have an aneurysm.

There's one for the family photo albums!

These scenes are just crazy. I mean, there’s one scene where she scuttles down the stairs backwards with her mouth bleeding. I don’t think there’s enough antibiotics in the world for that. Plus, this scene comes on the tails of Regan discovering that her director friend is dead and that Regan’s doctors can’t help her. Jesus. Can this woman’s life get any worse? Why not just add in the fact that she doesn’t get to appear in the sequel to the mix?

Oh, well, that last one – probably a plus…but still:

So we get some scenes of this detective guy who looks like a drunk, out-of-work Paul Newman investigating Father Karras – ironically, he says Father Karras looks like Paul Newman. Maybe having Paul Newman in this movie wouldn’t have been a bad idea. You could have had him be the possessed one. That would be something…especially if he played the role of the daughter just like Linda Blair does. I’m not going to post a picture of that, but just let it sit in your mind for a while: a little girl contracts an otherworldly possession and turns into Paul Newman. Terrifying.

And yes, I fully realize the above passage will never be entered into the annals of my all-time funniest jokes on the blog. Shut up. The detective guy’s only character seems to be inviting the people he interrogates to go see movies with him. I guess it’s supposed to be a way to try and bribe them, but I dunno; I’m more inclined to think he just has no friends after letting the killer in 12 Angry Men go free.

Well I never!

Either way he doesn’t get very far, and the movie mostly focuses on Chris’s attempts to save Regan. She finally consults with Father Karras, who has become a tortured soul after his mother passed away. Karras takes her seriously enough to start an investigation into whether or not Regan’s case merits an exorcism.

This is yet another difference from most other movies that took influence from The Exorcist: these scenes actually take their time and feel realistic. The Church above all is not just some transparent entity that lets people do whatever they want – there are rules. And very few times – much less in films like The Possession, The Devil Inside or The Conjuring – would they actually just allow an exorcism. But here we have the exception: this is the case that throws everyone for a loop, that proves the Church wrong after years of nothing, here’s another exorcism they have to do, nestled in this modern agnostic world.

Movies today just treat exorcisms like any other everyday thing: “Oh, damn, time for another exorcism again. Want to meet for coffee after?” Just try and tell me with a straight face that any of the scenes in The Conjuring that try and make this idea suspenseful are any good. Fucking please. This is the real deal. Here it feels like things matter. You, the viewer, feel the weight of Karras’s discovery and of the decision to perform the exorcism. That matters a lot.

They recruit Father Merrin, who was the old man from the opening, to come and help out. Apparently because Merrin has so much experience after almost dying the last time he did an exorcism. How do you think that conversation went? “Hey, Father Merrin…remember that time you almost died doing that extremely dangerous exorcism? …Want to do it again?” How rude.

So then we get the exorcism scenes, which are great in part just because any movie that can make two guys standing over a wrinkled Muppet reject and shouting “The power of Christ compels you!” suspenseful is doing something right.

"And for my next trick, I'll make a sequel without any logic or sense in it whatsoever!"

But we quickly find out that it doesn’t work as well as they’d like. Karras tries, but the demon in Regan just won’t let him forget his dearly departed mother, channeling her at every turn to rattle him. Karras has to go downstairs, and when he comes back up, Father Merrin has been killed by the demon. Losing control, Karras goes and strangles Regan until the demon leaves her and comes into him instead. Then he jumps out a window and dies, ending the demon’s reign of terror forever…or until the two sequels came out. But either way, hurray!

The ending does raise some interesting questions though – they went through all that ritualistic bullshit when the real way to beat the demon was just to strangle it out with your bare hands? How stupid they must be feeling now! Ha ha…a good man just lost his life. But seriously though. I really do like the subtext here: religion isn’t all-powerful, the Church isn’t all-knowing. In place of a holy, sacrosanct ritual, it’s blunt violence that wins the day in this movie. That’s pretty important.

And it’s a very important movie. As gruesome and unpleasant as The Exorcist can be, it really is a prime example of horror working outside its bounds and making something artistic and meaningful, while still being scary and suspenseful. It’s the best of both worlds, and an all-time classic. If you’ve never seen this, and are enamored with its pale imitators…well, you need to treat yourself to this movie this Halloween. Whether or not you agree with me that its modern-day imitators are crap, there is no denying the power of The Exorcist.

Happy Halloween!

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