The Last Exorcism is a documentary style found footage film that follows Rev. Cotton Marcus, who no longer believes in demons, as he goes on to perform an exorcism. His hope is that the documentary will reveal to the public that charade that is modern exorcism. Despite his slipping faith, he continues preaching as we see in a scene where he tells the filmmakers that when he gets going, he can preach anything and the congregation will go along with it. This leads to a bet about him preaching the good word of banana bread.
Cotton picks a random letter from the pile to investigate and the crew gets going. When they are getting close, the van is hailed down by a bot named Caleb effectively telling them to leave. They ignore the warning and continue down to the farm. What follows is what tends to follow in these sorts of movies with several notable twists on the genre.
Ahead are thoughts and SPOILERS
What I liked about this movie in particular was the pacing. It can be hard to maintain good suspense for 90 minutes and the filmmakers of The Last Exorcism seemed to realize that by having the first act and a half not even try to be scary. They take their time establishing the characters and the environment itself.
This movie doesn't tout being based on a true story, which I prefer for haunting type movies. The horror was split between suspense building leading to jump scares and wincing body pain. Similar to Grave Encounters, the character in this is a non-believer portraying a believer who through the course of the movie becomes a believer. And while we're comparing the two films, this movie actually has the footage found!
Speaking of the ending, knowing that Caleb is a bad guy puts a lot of interesting perspective on earlier parts of the movie. For example, he tells Rev. Marcus to leave upon first meeting him because he believes Marcus to be the real deal, thus ruining the nefarious plans. But when Caleb witnesses the truth behind one of Marcus' stage tricks, he says, "We don't have any problems now." Seemingly innocuous at the time, but in retrospect shows Caleb's confidence that Marcus will not be able to exorcise the demon.
Rating on the Spook-o-meter: 5 out of 10 boos
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