lookingland

what can you say about a movie with a score that includes music from Dog Fashion Disco? Dominion: The Exorcist was quite the prize this eve.

this movie has a chilling and wonderful opening scene which sets up high hopes. unfortunately it then spends the rest of its time unwinding into a ludicrous morass of bad costuming, wretched acting, a plot so banal and abrasive it might make good foot scrub, and some really horrendously lousy special effects.

the central plot is simple: Father Merrin, having lost his faith over a spat with some Nazis, goes on an archeological dig and discovers a buried church holding down satan. a young crippled outcast native is then possessed and needs some saving. now all of this is fine. somewhere under the film was perhaps a good script even. but the movie renders it one idiotic leap into another and you can tell the lack of logic is a hollywood afflication. apparently the script was recut and reshot after the first version because hollywood labeled it "unmarketable" ~ i'm not sure what they think made this version better (or conversely how bad that first version must have been if this was an improvement).

so let's talk about Father Francis, the young missionary who comes to teach the local native children. he brings the british army with him (and no pun intended: all hell breaks loose). now how this all comes about is anybody's guess, but the cows are eating the hyenas and the tribesman's wife gives birth to maggots, and the british officer shoots a woman and let's just say there's some unease between the locals and the army. meanwhile, young idealist Father Francis runs around randomly changing his clothes (because one ought to wear a cassock while poking around an archeological dig or taking a nap, but by all means put on practical desert duds any other time ~ this was a very bizarre trend throughout the film).

well, Father Francis being the only character with any sort of gonads, naturally the devil makes a mash of him. during an astonishingly puzzling nocturnal baptism ceremony (because that's the best time to go into a creepy church where the devil lives, right?) he winds up stripped to his (underwear? i couldn't tell you with any certainty quite what he's got on in this scene) ~ anyway ~ tied to a tree and shot full of arrows a la Saint Sebastian. we never find out who did this, but let's assume it was the locals even though it defies everything the movie has set up until now).

somehow he manages to survive this bit of gratuitous torture (oh my gosh he's alive! though the brits have been standing around on guard while they went to fetch Merrin, i guess no one bothered to check ~ duh). so yeah, he survives, but only long enough to tell the other priest: yo, check it out, satan's out there. go get 'em tiger. he all but said: do it for johnny, i swear.

so Merrin gears up and throws down and it's all pretty, well, boring and lame with a lot of "woo-woo" that doesn't amount to anything. Father Francis, meanwhile, doesn't even get a decent death scene. we just see his grave at the end. what a mugging.

this was so embarrassingly bad. it had such promise and actually a really good story to work with ~ but the production is just horrendous. i give it credit for not being relativist or offensive, but that's about all the credit it gets ~ that and opening scene with the Nazis and the scene in which Jomo kills all the children because he thinks Father Francis is the devil ~ that was a good scene (lots of empathy there).

so there were good things about this. it's not worth actually watching, but for analysis purposes (as a writer who has a few exorcists running around in my personal universe), there was useful stuff here.