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The Last Exorcism Part II Review
By Rich Cline
Good
When you qualify your movie as the "last" anything, a sequel seems a bit out of the question, but these new filmmakers have essentially relegated the 2010 original to a mere backstory. They have moved on from the video-cam format and the whole debunking premise to make a much more straightforward horror romp. And while it's packed with cliches, it heads full-speed into a final act that's jaw-droppingly bonkers enough to make this a guilty pleasure.
After the carnage of that farmhouse exorcism, Nell (Bell) is the only survivor. She's taken to a New Orleans halfway house with other battered women, who begin to teach her how to live her life after growing up in isolation. She still has a sense of her religious roots, but learns to enjoy pop music and even starts flirting with a cute handyman (Clark). Even though she wants to believe that her demon-possession wasn't real, it becomes apparent that maybe that previous exorcism didn't quite take. "A piece of him is still inside you," says an occult expert (Jensen), completely without irony. Indeed the demon is back with a vengeance, and he has something awful in mind.
Filmmaker Gass-Donnelly keeps the atmosphere tense, throwing in elements from every horror film in recent memory, including creepy masked figures, staticky broadcasts, insidious phone calls, buzzing houseflies and even a sassy psychic (Riggs). The soundtrack is full of creep-out noises, while the images are intercut with flickers of the previous film. But all of this is done in that bland Hollywood style that makes us jump without actually freaking us out. Thankfully, the film has Bell on board to deliver a performance much better than the movie deserves: she's genuinely unsettling as the tormented innocent.
Continue reading: The Last Exorcism Part II Review
The Last Exorcism Part II Trailer
After the last members of her family die in a horrific satanic ritual, Nell Sweetzer is found frightened wandering around Louisiana. Once she is found, she is encouraged to start afresh in New Orleans but wherever she goes, she can't seem to get the memory of her demonic possession out of her life and it is uncovered that her last exorcism was not, in fact, her last at all as the demon Alabam has returned to her body with plans of an ever more destructive and grisly nature. Will her next exorcism succeed in banishing the wrath of the creature taking over her, or will she be doomed to live with him inside her forever more?
This chilling supernatural horror has been directed by Ed Gass-Donnelly ('Small Town Murder Songs' 'This Beautiful City') who co-wrote the screenplay with Damien Chazelle ('Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench'). It follows on from the previous 'The Last Exorcism' film directed by Daniel Stamm whereby a minister who has lost his faith is called to exorcise Nell at her home where she lived with her father and brother. Looking to be just as disturbing as number one, 'The Last Exorcism Part II' is set to hit screens on March 15th 2013.
Director: Ed Gass-Donnelly
Continue: The Last Exorcism Part II Trailer
Songcatcher Review
OK
Wonderfully chameleonic actress Janet McTeer ("The King Is Alive," "Tumbleweeds") gives another of her distinctive and deeply immersed performances in "Songcatcher" as a priggish 1900s music scholar.
A terse, obstinate, overeducated woman who is deeply resentful at having been passed up for a promotion to full professor at her university (in favor of a man), she abandons civilization for a spell to visit her sister (Jane Adams), a teacher at a very remote one-room school in the Appalachian Mountains.
McTeer's intense and austere performance serves the story well as her character makes the discovery of her professional life while reluctantly roughing it with the rustic locals: The isolated society of struggling mountain people has preserved, intact, for hundreds of years the Scots-Irish folk songs carried to the New World by their ancestors.
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