A troubled evangelical minister agrees to let his last exorcism be filmed by a documentary crew.
Review
For approx seventy minutes of The Last Exorcisms runtime you are kept interested, intrigued and truly witnessing something unique in an Exorcism 'mockumentary'. Then the last ten minutes comes along and undoes all the good work that proceeded it, I mean totally, flat out, ruins it.
The premise is great, Reverend Cotton Marcus is an evangelical minister who is struggling to believe in his faith. He is also a part-time exorcist but is not sure that what he is doing is causing more harm than good to the people he is exorcising. Due to this he enlists a small film crew to follow him on his 'last exorcism' to debunk the whole theory.
He shows us all the tricks of the trade, electric shock rings, shaky beds and an MP3 player loaded with hundreds of demon noises ready to go. He claims all this is used by his fellow exorcists and nothing is ever real, its all a charade to make people believe that the demon has been ousted and in addition to strengthen their belief in God and Jesus.
Cotton and his film crew arrive at Louis Sweetzer's farm to exorcise his teenage daughter Nell who is apparently possessed by a demon. Cotton starts his routine and in the space of an afternoon claims to have exorcised the demon and all is well, that's when the real freaky stuff begins. Nell starts sleepwalking, attacks her brother with a knife, drowns her dolls and begins making strange baby noises.
This then brings out the real Cotton, a man who doesn't believe in possession but medical and psychological problems teenage girls can have. A few more twists and ugly storylines seem to suggest he's right. Until the final ten minutes.
Everything up to this point is under played and treat with the right amount of trepidation to keep you hooked. There are no real outright scares but the setup to each scene is played out with just the right amount of tension to keep you on the edge.
Then the end arrives. Good god what the hell happened. It's almost like the writers just ran out of ideas and decided to make a quick, utterly nonsense ending that doesn't fit with the aesthetic of the first seventy minutes. Sense and logic are thrown out of the window and the audience is then treated like a bunch of idiots and served an ending that deserves to go down as one of the worst ever put on film.
I can't give anything away as it would spoil the entire film, needless to say that if you do watch this film be prepared for the end scenes. That's the best advice I can offer you. The trouble with a turgid ending is that as its the last thing you see of the film its the one thing that you really remember. The rest gets diluted down and this is exactly what happens with The Last Exorcism.
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