The Last Exorcism Part II: Brainless Hullabaloo

You gotta hand it to the makers of The Last Exorcism Part II—after a surprise box office and critical hit with the original The Last Exorcism’s found-footage style, those responsible for the sequel decided (rightfully so) not to try and capture lightning in a bottle twice and abandoned pseudo-realism for the sake of a straight-forward narrative feature film. Unfortunately, that's just about the only thing we can give them credit for.

The decision to wisely avoid repeating the found footage aesthetic and immediately pigeonhole the sequel as a gimmick unable to stand on its own two feet assumes that co-writer Damien Chazelle and co-writer/director Ed Gass-Donnelly had something up their sleeves to validate the continuation of Nell's (Ashley Bell) story. Sending Nell to a halfway house for girls in New Orleans after she is found to be the only apparent survivor of Pastor Hanley's fiery mass from The Last Exorcism (shouldn't it retroactively be considered The Penultimate Exorcism?), Gass-Donnelly parallels Nell's continued struggle against the pesky Abalam with that of the sexual awakening of a teenage girl who had been an unwilling recluse her entire life.

On paper, the potential exists for both great spiritual and emotional conflict and growth for the naive, young former possessee: she befriends the worldly Gwen (Julia Garner), who introduces Nell to rock and roll music and lipstick; she lives in the Big Easy (or what looks like a street decorated to look like the Big Easy) where frivolity and decadence abound; and she works a job that brings her in regular contact with Chris (Spencer Treat Clark), who's clearly romantically inclined in spite of Nell's quiet nature. After enough exposure to the regular world, Nell begins to feel more and more like a regular girl. Even the nightmares stop.

But soon enough radios begin turning on by themselves and disembodied voices chime in to inform Nell (in so many words) that Abalam's got a case of blue balls and still badly wants to be inside her. Abalam's advances are a little less subtle than the other boys in the neighborhood, foregoing flowers and candy for visions of Nell's dead father and nocturnal possessions that cause her to do unspeakably obscene things like…um…gently caress her own cheek, I guess. It's not long until Nell becomes terrified that her immortal soul is still in danger.

And with that, The Last Exorcism Part II officially brings the number of terrified parties up to a grand total of 1. Despite the fact that the film will ultimately be categorized as "Horror" when it comes to streaming and DVD rental services, The Last Exorcism Part II doesn't try very hard to be scary, weakly putting forth a few false jump scares and disembodied voices as its Plans A, B and C when it comes to trying to scare the audience. The film is so inept with fright that it actually focuses on a street performer for not one, but TWO back-to-back scares, which occur at a time (broad daylight) and a place (a tepid parade celebration) that have to be the absolute antithesis of elements needed to create a sufficient atmosphere for mood and terror.

But even if Gass-Donnelly was good at scaring us, the hard work would've been wasted on a script that seems to be going absolutely nowhere until it mercifully decides to quit after an 88-minute stretch that feels like an eternity. The Last Exorcism kept us engaged because of the tale of the lost and rediscovered faith of Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian). His death was a tragic yet fitting end for the development of his character, but his absence in Part II has now been filled by Nell, who was an adequate foil for Cotton, but completely bland and uninteresting as a leading lady. The film goes to great lengths to make it insist that the battle over Nell's soul is important, perhaps carrying long-lasting, grandiose implications, but never once are we told or even given hints as to why it matters whether Nell is possessed by Abalam or retires to Florida and sells used cars.

Nell stumbles through the first half of this sterile film while her and her friends spout out dialogue so poorly constructed that it'd be easy to believe the screenplay was a poor North Korean knockoff written by a translator whose grasp on the English language was tenuous at best. Just when your brain is trying to recover from the shock that someone sincerely wrote the line "Your girl found it when she was lookin' for the freaky shit," the film suddenly shifts narrative gears, abandoning the awkward teenage interactions and introducing Cecile (Tarra Riggs), a representative from The Order of the Right Hand, a small religious group charged with Nell's protection that not only appears completely out of left field, but also forsakes the first film's God vs. Satan conflict and drags the sequel into the realm of nebulous, generic voodoo hullabaloo en route to an ending that is both brainless and mean in how it treats its own logic and innocent protagonist.

For the sake of all of our immortal souls, let’s hope this time around the filmmakers take the "last" in The Last Exorcism Part II to heart.