We have now reached the 50th anniversary of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, a film that was once a truly outré, dangerous piece of cultural ordnance, but is now just another franchise, putty to be shaped into whatever new, theoretically scary form the current moment demands. A fresh, semi-rebooted sequel has been released, one that, like many others that seek to revivify overcluttered mythologies, promises to clarify the series by cutting it back to the roots. I cannot speak to the quality, but the outcome of previous projects in the same vein has been generally dubious at best, a status seemingly borne out by roundly negative reviews.
There are, of course, other viable forms of sequel. One, also popular of late, and under which the new Exorcist may very well be subsumed, involves updating and streamlining a classic to modern tastes, while retaining all the familiar narrative beats. Another, more of vintage style but still cropping up from time to time, involves profit-seeking opportunists, often European or Asian production companies, doing a low-budget knockoff that compensates for its smaller scale by upping the shocks, violence and gore. The Pope’s Exorcist, a new piece of horror fluff that hinges largely on the lure of seeing Russel Crowe embody an Italian priest, lands somewhere in between the two, evincing the overall shoddiness of the second model while replicating the same general lack of ideas as the first.
Basically, the film delivers only on that one dangled promise, which is the spectacle of Russell Crowe as a brassy, demon-battling warrior of the Lord. This is Father Gabriele Amorth, a real-life Vatican official who is alleged to have served as the Pope’s official exorcist, and whose claim of performing 100,000 such rituals over a 20-year span reeks strongly of self-aggrandizement. As depicted here, he at least has a sense of humor, toodling around on a scooter with a faux Ferrari sticker affixed to its front, alongside another representing a frosty pint of Guinness. Ribald and gregarious, Amorth roams the country seeking out Satan’s emissaries, tricking the demons into jumping into pigs and then having eager peasants unload on them with both barrels. It’s a rough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.
The priest meets his apparent match in the Castilian countryside, where a family of Americans has decamped to a remote, dilapidated cathedral currently undergoing restoration. Bearing the requisite load of recent trauma seemingly mandatory for any contemporary horror clan, they are also equipped with an equivalently paper-thin backstory and an off-the-shelf family dynamic (strong-but-sensitive mother, jaded-but-caring teen sister, mute-and-anemic tween boy). In this case, the father has died in a car accident, forcing the family to move into this hulking new home, which due to some inconceivable financial wrinkle is now their only remaining asset. The further question of why this location would be in Spain, and not Italy itself, has something to do with the Inquisition, which has either so befouled a section of the planet to the point of being off limits to God himself, or was actually inspired by the sinister direction of demons.
A film that fully pushed for the later conclusion, instead of confusingly hedging on both this and nearly every other aspect of its construction, would be worthy B-movie fare. Other such touches are scattered about, from the fiends routinely adopting sexy female form, to Crowe’s winking performance and the appearance of the original Django himself, with Franco Nero adding an over-the-top turn as the Pope. Beyond these nuggets, however, The Pope’s Exorcist is far too focused on hitting all the rote, Exorcist-aping beats. Once it blows past these, like a distracted student rushing through homework, it allows itself 15 or so minutes of demon-bashing mayhem. These are not great either, but at least show promise; one cannot help but imagine Amorth himself toting a shotgun, dispensing holy lead alongside a few more juicy one-liners, and mourn a little for what we instead receive.
The Pope’s Exorcist is currently streaming on Netflix, an acquisition that makes sense, considering how well it fits in with their other offerings. The streamer did not produce the movie itself, but its pet style, or at least the general downgrade in overall craftsmanship that marks much of its in-house content, is all over it, as is the sense of the whole thing being both algorithmically derived and directed for maximum meme potential. Further time is wasted saddling Amorth with his own traumatic backstory (involving fighting as an anti-Mussolini Partisan, another vague hedge toward defusing the Catholic Church’s history of poorly chosen alliances). The potential spookiness of the cathedral setting, meanwhile, is quashed by uninspired setups and flat lighting that appears to have been evened out in post, granting the whole thing the gauzy aspect of a Thomas Kincaid painting of a haunted house.
These are all dodges, which skirt and defuse potential controversy rather than courting it, a commitment to aversion that assures the film can’t remotely function as the exploitation flick it so badly wants to pretend to be. It’s also not really an original movie, considering how much of its construction relies on the salvaged parts of other ones. So what is it, beyond another resident of Streaming Hell, this one’s positioning is perhaps a little more literal than most? Such a movie, which might easily be a slam dunk of good, dumb fun built around a versatile lead actor with enough star power to carry the role, instead bears out many of the issues endemic to both the modern horror and action genres. Foremost among these is the ending, which in a slight twist, at least tweaks the usual sequel-mongering conclusion. Many movies now dangle a future confrontation with an even greater enemy; The Pope’s Exorcist teases 199 of them, with the Pope revealing a round number of 200 Satanic demons residing around the globe, all of them begging for immediate expulsion back to Hell. At least one of these sequels is in the works, and one hopes that it, or some of its 198 potential follow-ups, will be better than this one.
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