With way more humour than the trailer would lead you to believe, The Pope’s Exorcist works on a few different levels. Russell Crowe gets to camp it up as Father Gabriel Amorth a Vespa-riding iconoclast who loves to stick it to his strait-laced superiors.
Those laughs are often countered by the intensity of the possession scenes. They are more than reminiscent of that granddaddy of the genre, The Exorcist. Those moments are delightfully over the top and build to a bat-shit-crazy crescendo by the film’s end.
When Julia (Alex Essoe), Amy (Laurel Marsden) and Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) first roll up to the creepy castle-like structure in the middle of nowhere, it’s not long before things go bump in the night. As the possession escalates so does the gore.
As an exercise in exorcism, the film breaks very little new ground but it seems that is not really the point. It puts entertainment before all-out horror and gives it the chance to break out of the limited appeal of the devil-made me-do-it category. It will happily provide something bad to do this Good Friday.
Rob Hudson
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