A lot more silly, 80s, campy fun and not as scary as I was expecting.

In hindsight, if I’d payed more attention to the trailer I would have seen clues that this wasn’t a deep past period piece.  I went in thinking it was 1800s, but no, it is a rollicking 1980s piece, complete with the soundtrack and splattery, horror sensibilities.  

It is enjoyable, for sure, and Rusty makes a great, hilarious exorcist, always wise-cracking and one-upping the establishment, as one kind of expects from an Aussie in the Vatican.  Not that his character is an Aussie.  And I’m sure there will be people hating on his accent and his Italian and his Latin… there are a lot of subtitled language bits in this film.  But I liked him for this role.  He’s the only recognisable star.

I was expecting a lot more tripping around conducting exorcisms, but no, he gets bogged down with one particular case.  Now fully, I bow down to the casting of the main boy because he does the most intense and kick-arse job of a child-possessed.  It seems truly gruelling.  From the moment he appears on screen he looks right for a creepy child situation, and he backs that up with intensity.

There are a lot of great creepy effects, your real “evil is here” sort of vibes.  And don’t get me wrong, horror comedy is a thing I really love.  But for some reason this sort of unstoppable unknowable evil type film is a genre I can sometimes find quite delightfully scary.  Despite being an atheist&/agnostic, I find the concept of great evils delicious – probably why I love The Fifth Element (1997) so much.  And in this film, the funny bits did undercut the seriousness of the scary bits.

I think maybe part of my feelings overall come from the old problem of tonal-trailer mis-match.  I went in expecting a serious, creepy horror like Hereditary (2018) and ended having seen something more like Hellboy (2019).

This is a tough one to score and I really want to give a half-star, but I feel I’m rounding down when forcing myself to commit it to a whole.

J* gives it 3 stars.