Nothing but crap this week.

The Exorcist: Believer

I wanna hop on those tubular bells and just go, “Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. / Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. / Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap.” Oh, biscuits in a clam shell! The bumble bees ain’t lyin’, this buzz is 100% true – The Exorcist: Believer is a certified mud pie. Sticky, smelly, and bound to get you sick, David Gordon Green‘s rancid bowl of Halloween leftovers is as confounding as it is howlingly bad.

The first half hour or so of this plays like a lukewarm episode of a CBS missing persons procedural, before we start getting teased with the demonic stuff. The demonic stuff comes in quick. with over-exposed flashes that feel like a tame version of a Slipknot video. After that, we get the typical stuff – pissing the bed, attacking the parents, dumb nods to the original – my favorite is having a little girl hop on a bed and say, “Cunting Daughter!” in a high-pitched girl voice before attacking a totally underutilized Ellen Burstyn. The movie goes on for two whole hours and we keep waiting for it to get better or even just a little more clever, and it never does. Green and Danny McBride’s first installment of a planned trilogy (fucking kill me), is worse than bad – it’s egregiously lazy filmmaking made by two exceptionally talented artists who think, as an audience member, you’re a total soda-guzzling, popcorn-farting, middle America-Living’, two-digit-I.Q.-havin’, fucking beer-battered idiot dipshit. Gee thanks, guys.

Much like what they ended up doing for Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, The Exorcist: Believer is all about community coming together to stop evil. It’s about putting aside your religious or socio-economical differences and fighting the devil cause the devil is making your 12-year-old touch herself in church (actual scene). I think the word “community” is said upwards of thirty times in this but at least it’s not as lame as “EVIL DIES TONIGHT!” That movie, Halloween Kills, was actually much better because for all its flaws it actually attempted to entertain people with what they came for – slashing and scares. This is just a heavy-handed, warmed-over ethics lesson that trades in good scares for monologues about what “community” means. Much like how those Halloween movies’ humor took the air out of the scares, the constant sermonizing Green puts us through takes the air out of anything remotely frightening in this. I mean, it’s all mid-level CGI but there are times where you think something spooky is building but it just never delivers.

I guess I should explain the plot. A photographer (Hamilton’s Leslie Odom, Jr.) and his daughter (Lidya Jewett) are experiencing a bit of a shaky relationship related to the mother who died giving birth to the daughter. Naturally the daughter is curious, but the dad is really stubborn about not wanting to talk about his wife. Anyway, his daughter and some white girl (Olivia Marcum) go off to the woods to do a seance, and they go missing for three days. Presumably, they get possessed by Pazuzu or something. They come back and start acting weird so the parents contact Ellen Burstyn to save the day. Like I said, there are barely any scares besides some really lame jump scares – one of which is someone opening a desk that’s stuck, WTF??? – another involves a snake underneath a rock.

The film’s biggest saving grace is the performances. Burstyn is solid despite being underused, and Leslie Odom, Jr. clearly knows how to lead a project. The fabulous Ann Dowd gives it her all as the film’s most complex character, and Jennifer Nettles (Aimee-Leigh from Righteous Gemstones) and Norbert Leo Butz (Broadway’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Netflix’s Bloodline) are more than competent as the white girl demon’s parents. The two girls who are possessed, Lidya Jewett and Olivia Marcum, are also very good and not responsible for this movie being a turd.

I’m just really confused as to what David Gordon Green and Danny McBride are doing here. The easy explanation is they’re all about the benjamins, which joke’s on them cause Exorcist underperformed this past weekend. My second explanation is that it’s all an elaborate, sarcastic joke, like “Lol, I can’t believe they keep letting us do this crap.” Real Andy Kaufman style. My third explanation is that they’re trying to spread a helpful message of community and togetherness to the stupidest group of people on the planet – the mainstream horror audience. Remember, mainstrem horror audience people are the folks who respond to Saw sequels by saying shit like “It really makes you think about what you would do in the situation and that’s like deep.” I have no idea what they’re trying to do but it’s hard to believe the dudes, especially McBride, hugely responsible for one of the best comedies on television (The Righteous Gemstones) are so inept at making horror movies. Grade: D (In Theaters)

Reptile

As much as I love watching Benicio Del Toro act his crazy eyes off, I couldn’t get into Grant Singer‘s Reptile, a flavorless police procedural/murder mystery that cobbles together elements from superior crime pictures to create a lame Michael Mann impersonation. There are a lot of nods to Heat in here, most notably a police detective dinner that’s even lit the same way. This is one of the first scenes of the movie where Del Toro’s character tells a well-received homophobic joke to very lazily demonstrate ACAB. Yeah, we know. Del Toro‘s character is rough around the edges and needs to get the job done. He’s investigating the murder of a woman whose boyfriend was an investment banker or something? I dunno, Wikipedia doesn’t say and it’s not worth investigating. He’s a money guy played by terribly miscast Justin Timberlake who doesn’t come across nearly as slimy as he should. There’s also the victim’s ex-husband who runs drugs and a weird neighbor guy played by Michael Pitt. Eric Bogosian and Domenick Lombardozzi play two other cops and the cast is rounded out by Alicia Silverstone as Del Toro‘s spunky wife, one of the more memorable parts of this forgettable movie. The ending is fairly predicable and the movie takes a long time to get there. This is one of the most poorly paced movies of the year, and at 136 minutes, scenes linger like a drunken house guest that won’t go to bed. I watched Reptile at 7:30pm and fell asleep 4-5 times. I’m unfamiliar with Grant Singer or his work, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was A.I. This movie has a deeply unnatural/robotic feel to it. It’s really lacking that human touch you’d get from something directed by an actual human being. Grade: C- (Netflix)

No One Will Save You

If Reptile is too quiet, No One Will Save You is far too loud. Impressive feat for a movie with less than five spoken lines of dialogue. Brian Duffield‘s overly quirky, mostly silent film No One Will Save You is about a woman (Kaitlyn Dever – Booksmart, Dopesick) living in a rural area in present day, but she’s obsessed with the 1950s. Or maybe just the fashions of the 1950s. Anyway, everything in her house looks like she’s a pink lady and it’s annoying how quirky she is. One night aliens crash into her house. They’re strong enough to break through wood houses, but not strong enough to survive getting hit with a Christmas tree ornament. Giving credit where credit is due, the first five or ten minutes of the invasion are very well choreographed and executed. They drew me into the picture but as the movie went on and we saw more and more of the aliens (shit these things get more exposure than Dever almost) I completely lost interest. Added to that, they decide to give Dever‘s character a tragic backstory. Sandra Bullock‘s character didn’t need one in Gravity, and Dever doesn’t need one here. It’s presented as this alien-hypnosis-dog-toy-induced acid flashback and it’s so dumb and heavy-handed and doesn’t make Dever‘s character more rough around the edges or even more sympathetic. Also, let’s pour one out for Dever who mostly just had dumb-looking CGI aliens to work with. She’s no Buster Keaton, but she does a very good job with communicating what her character is going through without using her voice. The picture ends on a really stupid 50s inspired dance number that makes absolutely zero sense other than the filmmakers like the time period. I frequently lost interest during the film’s long-feeling 93-minute runtime. No One Will Save You fails at sustaining suspense or creating a complex enough protagonist we can really get behind. It’s a reminder that some movies actually need dialogue and just because you make a bold choice as a filmmaker, it doesn’t mean it will pay off. Grade: C- (Hulu)

V/H/S/85

It really looked like Shudder was doing a good job with these annual V/H/S found footage horror installments. V/H/S/94 was pretty decent, while V/H/S/99 was actually good. However, the idea pond was running seriously low for V/H/S/85, a collection of found footage vignettes set in 1985. This is the most underwhelming offering since the third installment, V/H/S/Viral, which basically tanked the original franchise before being revived by Shudder seven years later. With these movies, I find it’s best to break it down segment by segment, so let’s go:

SPOILERS

Segment #1 – No Wake by Mike P. Nelson (2021’s Wrong Turn remake) is the shittiest short of the bunch. It features some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen in a movie, let alone the V/H/S franchise. I apologize, I hate to bag on actors, seeing as though I am one and SAG is in the middle of a strike. Still, the performances in No Wake are so bad that they frequently drag you out of the narrative and go as far to even confuse you. For example, the acting was so bad in No Wake that I thought this was a movie within a movie, and at any second, someone off-camera would yell, ‘Cut! You guys all suck!” That didn’t happen, though.

Essentially, this one is about a bunch of uninteresting, borderline creepy teens who go up to a lake and become victims of a mass shooting while riding on a boat. I’ll say this – a boat in the middle of a body of water is an terrifying location to set a bullet-ridden ambush cause where will you go? How will you duck for cover? This one girl gets her jawbone blown off, and a couple more get mortally wounded…but they don’t die!! One dude’s intestines are hanging out, and he asks, “How are we still alive?” “Must be the water,” one says, and then the short just fucking ends. ????????????????????? – score: 1/5

Segment #2 – God of Death by Gigi Saul Guerrero (Bingo Hell) is a significant improvement over No Wake. You believe all the actors, and it seems visually inspired. It gets worse as it goes, though. It starts off as this bonkers, high-energy Mexican morning news program, and then an earthquake(?) kills almost everyone in the studio, including the news anchor lady (Gabrielle Roel), who made me laugh three times in two minutes – impressive. A rescue crew comes and tries to lead the survivors out, but they keep going further underground. At the same time, something invisible stalks them, taking each survivor out individually. Eventually, they get to an area with a bunch of Satan shit on the wall, and an Aztec warrior princess demon brutally attacks them. They then cut to more footage of the natural disaster, but the subtitles were super fucked up, so I don’t know if they confirmed it was an earthquake or not. It ends shortly after, amounting to nothing more than a handful of legitimately spooky images. – score: 2.5/5

Segment #3 – TKNOGD by Natasha Kermani (Lucky) is far and away the best short because it’s the easiest to follow. Kermani had a clear concept that she executed straightforwardly. Seems like maybe the bar for these V/H/S movies should be higher. Look, I’m no traditionalist when it comes to style or experimental storytelling, but no one involved in a V/H/S movie is of the competency of artists like Lynch or Cronenberg, so it never pans out. TKNOGD is about a performance artist (Chivonne Michelle – who can actually act) giving a Ted Talk who summons a demon during an old-timey VR demonstration. This goofy-ass demon appears as a VR monster and kills the shit out of her. Nice! – score: 3.5/5

Segment #4 – Ambrosia by Mike P. Nelson, the same guy who did the first and worst segment. This is the second part of No Wake, where we explore who the shooter is: a young woman who is part of a murder cult. There’s a lot of subdued Proud Boy energy to this crowd as they watch a VHS recording of the young woman sheepishly smiling to the camera and then committing a brutal mass shooting spree. Eventually, the cops arrive, prompting everyone to take out their machine guns and get killed by the cops, except the leading woman who, much like the teens on the lake, can’t die? They never explain this, but the acting is way better here. Ambrosia mostly just reminded me of a much lesser version of V/H/S/94‘s “Terror” about a bunch of white supremacists getting exploded by vampire blood.- score: 2/5

Segment #5 –Dreamkill by Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange, Sinister) is the biggest disappointment of the bunch, given the pedigree of the filmmaker. This guy directed a fucking Marvel movie; a V/H/S 6 assignment shouldn’t trip him up. This confusing hodge-podge of ideas is about a psychic goth kid whose dreams of real-life murders are randomly recorded onto VHS tapes. Freddy Rodriguez of Six Feet Under and The Pest fame plays a cop whose partner is the father of the boy and the eventual killer. This one is not lacking in action, but the CGI bloodshed is laughably fake and takes the juice out of every kill. The acting in this one is pretty bad as well, not No Wake bad, but come on, Freddy Rodriguez, you’re an Emmy nominee. What happened? – score: 2/5

Segment #6 – Total Copy by David Bruckner (Hellraiser 2022), a V/H/S veteran having been involved with the franchise since the beginning, delivers a well-made but underwhelming alien story. The problem with Total Copy is that it’s so predictable and says absolutely nothing that any movie about aliens, robots or Skynet hasn’t said ten times better. For some reason, this short is spread out as a runner between the other shorts in four sections. It’s about an alien life form that scientists captured, kept locked up in a room with a TV, and then acted super surprised when it eventually broke out and started killing people. The fact it’s far and away the second best short of V/H/S/85 speaks to this installment’s overall lack of quality. It should be noted that Bruckner was responsible for one of the franchise’s absolute best shorts – Amateur Night – about three predatory bros who accidentally pick up a succubus at a local bar. That was a 4/5, this is a mere 3/5.

Even though I sincerely didn’t love this movie, I enjoyed it more than anything this week. It wasn’t as obnoxious as No One Will Save You, it wasn’t as soulless as Reptile, and it wasn’t as obnoxious and soulless as Exorcist Kills. Grade: C (Shudder)