The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

1987. Gabriele Amorth (Russell Crowe), the Vatican’s very own exorcist, is in some troubles with church politics. A young career cardinal has made himself the speaker of people who find the whole exorcism thing rather problematic in the modern world, and tries to push Amorth out of office, making a pretty grumpy – when he’s not winking at nuns - old man even grumpier. The Pope (Franco Nero, logically cast as the Polish pope in a movie where Russell Crowe is supposed to be Italian) is on our rebel establishment hero’s side, though, so it’s clear right from the start of the movie that nothing will come out of this for Amorth. Why the sub plot is in the movie anyway, only god or the pope will know.

Anyway, once that business is pushed aside, the Pope sends Amorth to Spain. There, an American widow (Alex Essoe, again wasted in a plot point role, alas) and her teenage kids (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney and Laurel Marsden) have moved into an old abbey her husband has mysteriously bequeathed to her, and are soon in rather dire possession troubles. The abbey, it appears, harbours a particularly dark secret, that will need all of Amorth’s experience to uncover. Things are so dangerous, even the Pope will be affected.

As regular readers of my diatribes and vague ideas here will know, I’m not much of a fan of Western possession horror; I don’t even like The Exorcist. There’s just something about the sub-genre as it is practiced in American and British movies that sticks in my atheist craw, even though I’m usually perfectly capable of appreciating religious art and sometimes even thought. All too often, I find this sort of affair comical rather than horrific, even when it is not sprinkled with problematic moralizing like the Conjuring films (which to me stand in the direct tradition of things like The Exorcist).

Julius Avery’s The Pope’s Exorcist certainly is not the exorcism movie to convert me – or anyone else for that matter – to exorcism movies as a serious or effective horror sub-genre (I hope), but I found myself having one hell of a time with it. Though, it has to be said, probably not for the reasons the filmmakers wanted.

It is clear from the very start that this is a Very Serious Movie that goes for an overblown, turned up to Eleven tone, Big Dramatic Flashbacks, and Deep Dark Secrets (capitalization probably in the script this way) – it really is pompous as all that. What makes the film so amusing is that this pomposity is in the service of a story that may start as a drab, overly plotted exorcism-by-the-numbers tale but increasingly drifts off into the realm of extremely pulpy nonsense with gates to hell in abbey cellars, possession double play and blood-puking popes which rub against the self-serious nature of the storytelling in ways that can’t help but be incredibly entertaining. The film’s final act gets absolutely bonkers with this stuff in a way that I’d call absolutely gleeful, if the film’s general air didn’t suggest it’s simply not intelligent enough to actually be this way on purpose. Which does not make it any less entertaining, of course.

Watching an over-emoting, unkindly aged Russell Crowe with a terrible Italian accent throw himself into this nonsense with the full force of his old star personality is pretty great, as well; I’m not quite sure he’s buying into the absurdity or does mean his performance seriously, but I do salute his effort to make (weird) decisions and go with whatever is thrown at him; mostly it’s blood, as a matter of fact.

The Pope’s Exorcist gets special bonus points for an ending that desperately wants to open up the possibility of a Pope’s-Exorcistiverse, with potentially 199 other films. Personally, I hope for The Pope’s Exorcist vs Sadako next.

In short: Red Island (2018)

Warning: I’m going to spoil what goes for a major plot reveal in this one right in the synopsis!

The film follows in flashback and with copious voiceovers a story John (Georgie Daburas) tells a cop after his wife Amy (Alex Essoe) disappeared on an island he took her to help save their marriage. Apparently, a miscarriage had caused a depression in Amy that put quite the strain on the marriage. Well, perhaps the fact that John’s main reaction to his wife’s suffering is to whine incessantly about how she isn’t to him like she was before has something to do with their marital troubles, too, but neither he nor the film really seem to realize that. But then, John’s lying through his teeth about his wish to save their marriage by island travel anyway, and is in fact there to steal some cursed “Indian” plaque for some Russian guy. Why he’s even taking Amy? Don’t ask me.

Of course, that cursed plaque is indeed cursed, and Amy seems to connect in some vague way to its mystical goat person guardian.

Directed and written by someone calling themselves Lux, Red Island has exactly two things going for it: Alex Essoe, one of the undervalued (otherwise she’d not have to be in this film) genre actresses right now, and a forested island setting that does indeed look like the liminal space it is supposed to be. Of course, the film does very little with it human ace card, putting a cap on Essoe’s performance by telling what should really be her character’s tale through the eyes of her – frankly about as interesting as his name and certainly also not very interestingly played – husband. Which would already be bad enough, but we get a double dose of him thanks to the unnecessary framing device, and hardly a scene goes by where poor Daburas doesn’t have to go into a pointless off-screen monologue that mostly tells a viewer nothing they haven’t already seen, or descends into flowery musings that are simply not as deep as they apparently believe to be. The cut-aways to the police interview are a great way to destroy what tension the film manages to build, something that certainly isn’t helped but that whole bit of the plot not going anywhere at all. In fact, the few pieces of information we get through them and another pointless flashback to John and the Russian would have been much better integrated into scenes between Amy and John. That might even have upgraded the pacing from leaden to slow. If ever a film needed unity of place and time, this one does. Also, a ban on off-screen babbling.


It’s a bit of a shame, really, because there is a pretty interesting, a bit Laird Barron-ish tale to be told with this island, and even from Red Island’s basic premises.

In short: The Neighbor (2016)

Not to be confused with other films about problematic neighbourhoods; also, there will be spoilers.

John (Josh Stewart) and his wife Rosie (Alex Essoe) work for John’s uncle Neil (Skipp Sudduth) as drug trafficking middlemen. They’ve put enough money aside to retire from their life of crime and move somewhere nicer far, far, away, hoping Neil won’t hunt them down and murder them. They didn’t steal from the man, mind you.

Unfortunately, the couple will have rather more trouble at their hands than an easily ticked-off Midwestern country drug lord. While John is making his final delivery to Neil, Rosie witnesses their neighbour Troy (Bill Engvall) murdering a young man. When John returns, Rosie is gone, supposedly run off, as Troy suggests to him. Only, if Rosie had wanted to leave John the day when they were splitting anyway, she probably would have taken the bag full of money in their house too, or at least some of it. So John knows Troy is lying, particularly since their last encounter the night before had already suggested something to be very wrong with the guy. Yes, wrong even from the perspective of someone in the drug trade.

Consequently John stealthily breaks into the house of Troy and his two sons (Ronnie Gene Blevins and Luke Edwards) to find Rosie, learning quite a bit more about their family business than he wanted to in the process, starting a night from hell for everyone involved.

I didn’t quite expect director Marcus Dunstan to follow up his silly yet wonderful The Collection with a clever little thriller making some caustic subtextual remarks about the American Dream™ like The Neighbor but I’m certainly not complaining.

This is the sort of relatively small-scale production that does basically everything right: the acting is fine throughout, the script effective and the direction is tight and focused, quickly introducing us to what’s what with the characters and then never stopping escalating their situation from there. There’s a sharpness (plus a whole lot of Kurtzman-created blood) to the proceedings even though The Neighbor does have something of an happy end, however ironic the film presents it. But then, one of the main points of the film is to show America (or at least the part of America it concerns itself with) as a place where it’s impossible not have blood on one’s hands.

Which doesn’t mean we’re not supposed to like John and Rosie; they are, after all, the only characters on screen who actually do something for others beyond taking care of their own survival, while their guilt for other people’s suffering through drugs and what comes with them is twice removed, them being middlemen (middlepersons?), after all.

If you’re really looking for something to complain here, it’s probably the basic set-up that’ll make you (un)happy there. It is a bit difficult to swallow that these particular people should end up to be neighbours but starting off from an improbable place as The Neighbor does is certainly a typical thriller move – Hitchcock certainly did it more often than not. And if I can suspend my disbelief for ghosts and zombies, I certainly can do the same when it comes to difficult neighbours.

Otherwise, The Neighbor is as fine a contemporary low budget thriller as you’re likely to find.

In short: Starry Eyes (2014)

Like so many young women in Hollywood, Sarah (Alex Essoe) has the dream of becoming not just a working actress but a very traditional star. All that dream has brought her so far are bunch of failed auditions, a humiliating job as a waitress in a themed fast food restaurant, a bunch of friends of dubious quality, and the habit to reduce her stress levels by angrily pulling her own hair out.

Things – and not just things – are certainly going to change for her when she has a breakdown (with hair-pulling, screaming, the works) after a particularly humiliating audition for a horror movie with the puntastic title of “The Silver Scream”. Witnessing this the casting director (Maria Olsen) at once warms to her, inviting her to another session of doing exactly the same in front of her and her assistant. They’re well pleased with Sarah’s following performance/live breakdown. In the following weeks, there are further sessions of appropriately sadistic vigour, all in the name of helping Sarah transform herself completely (which you may want to take very literally). Why, one might even think these people belong to some kind of occult society with sinister goals! All the while, Sarah’s life – inward and outward – unravels around her.

Kevin Kolsch’s (or Kölsch – IMDB and credits don’t agree) and Dennis Widmyer’s Starry Eyes is quite the thing, applying choice occult horror tropes to the small yet fine Hollywood horror story sub-genre (or perhaps the other way around) in consequent and increasingly bloody (and pus-sy etc) ways.

This is a film about the will to success taken to its most horrid extremes, a film that views character traits and concepts US cinema very often praises to high heavens as a particularly insidious road to self-destruction. Self-destruction of this type, the film argues, is in one form or the other generally approved of or even expected from actresses trying for a breakthrough that will most probably never come. Being a horror film, Starry Eyes does take the whole self-destruction/total transformation business very literally, not accidentally hitting the core of desperation lying under the idea of turning oneself into a star until it oozes blood and gore.

The whole thing is grounded by Alex Essoe’s terrific performance as Sarah, a full-body tour de force that is as uncomfortable to watch as it should be, including moments of horrible frailty, putting things on display that’ll make you squirm – particularly since the performance has a terrible sense of honesty about it.

Obviously, Starry Eyes is not a terribly easy film to watch – not because it is a bad film, but rather because it is so effective at making the audience look at exactly the things it really doesn’t want to see; it’s brilliant and exhausting.