Priests? Check. Creepy music? Check. Moving furniture? Check. References and connections to a certain early 1970s horror classic? Check. Swearing and grisly makeup effects? Check. People wandering around in the dark for no good reason? Massive check. The Exorcism really is one of the blandest and least shocking horrors in ages. Originally (and far more memorably) called The Georgetown Project five years ago, it's now been saddled with the dullest title imaginable and its content is so thunderingly unshocking that it's got away with a weedy 15 certificate.
It does have a fairly decent idea, with Russell Crowe as a washed-up actor with one last shot at getting his career together post-rehab and quashing his own inner demons: playing an exorcist in a remake of a certain early 1970s horror classic. Like that certain early 1970s horror classic, it appears to be cursed: Crowe's character (Anthony Miller, presumably named after Jason Miller, star of a certain early 1970s horror classic, who also happens to be the father of this film's director) is a last-minute replacement for another actor who suddenly and mysteriously died in the opening scene; a studio light suddenly falls from the gantries, just missing someone as it lands. Meanwhile Miller can't remember his lines or get into character and behaves increasingly erratically...
This is the second Russell Crowe exorcism movie in the last couple of years (even though this one was apparently mostly filmed first) and it's easily the weaker of them. It does very little of any interest and a whole lot of stuff we've seen many times before, and trots it out to no real effect. And it's yet another brand new horror film that seems to think that switching the lights off is scary. Darkness is one thing, but shooting extended scenes in almost total darkness, to the extent that any image still discernible is all but lost in the ambient light from the cinema's exit signs, is something else entirely and a regrettable trend in current genre offerings. (Night Swim, Baghead and Tarot are particular offenders this year.) The Exorcism really should be a lot better than this: it certainly had the potential, but it's just so crushingly ordinary, a massive box of very, very ordinary. And while it's a tossup as to whether it's as bad as last year's dismal Believer, it's unarguable that even the lesser actual sequels of that certain early 1970s horror classic - even the second instalment that almost everybody hates - were better.
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