The Last Exorcism Part II

I had planned to just write an imdb review for this (I will just truncate this into something manageable), because it really isn't very good (in fact, it's pretty awful), but for whatever reason my review just kept going on and on. This is basic rambling about the movie.

 *

“I saw your devil and he’s planning something…for you.”

This is one damned frustrating, oddball film. It really shouldn’t have ever been made. A regular film based after a found footage film. The Order of the Right Hand Path is her only hope, the girl, now flowering into a woman, has little support that is functional enough to rescue her from “him”. Abalom, the demon that possessed and controlled her during the found footage The Last Exorcism, has been temporarily (I guess; but the film questions whether he ever has really left) disposed of from her. He loves, cherishes, and adores Nell and wants to have her mind, body, and soul all to himself. This demon is too powerful to put an end to without multiple people commanding its departing of Nell. 

 

The rest of the film has crazy shit happening to and around Nell. The pace is rather glacial, and the demonic stuff is all over the map regarding its potency. Nell has lost it all, seemingly the only survivor of a bonfire sacrificial Satanic ritual that was combated by the found footage preacher (who found his faith after being challenged when he seemed to accept that God, spirituality, and the Holy Ghost power were real). 

She is taken to a halfway house for “abandoned girls” and tries to maintain a maid job at a hotel while finding teenage love with a troubled young man around her age named Chris. The girls at the house seem to become more aware of her past and become antagonistic (as teen girls sometimes do), and Abalom increasingly awakens around her, using whatever (or whoever) it/he can to draw her into his/its grips. This does have a provocative nature to it thanks to Abalom’s sexual interest in Nell (one scene of levitation seems to indicate that Abalom fucks Nell while she sleeps!), beyond just the demon’s love for her. The ending is rather underwhelming as the order that is supposed to cleanse Nell of her demon is basically three amateurs who seem to have read up on exorcisms on the internet yet besides the basics don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Abalom proves too much for the trio and offers to bond with Nell if she will just accept the demon (the trio decides to poison her with a morphine overdose in a bag of holy water that seemed to have as much power as tap water from a sewer).

 

The PG-13 liability curses the film into subjection so it can’t go very far (there seems to be a desire to, but those involved in this film cater to the rating system hoping to make a profit instead to a wider audience but the film is a failure thanks to it), and perhaps this film could have been better accepted had it went balls to the wall. Instead you have a bunch of people around Nell acting peculiar or trying to figure her out, as she deals with some nutjob in a church telling her to give in (who is this guy? A preacher actually belonging to Abalom? He just appears and starts acting weird towards her), a couple of people having seizures (a girl who seems to go through a bone crackling possession, another Nawlins tourist on the street trying to get a picture with the “Youtube possession freak”), flies appearing on occasion, hallucinations of her pops, a particular roommate who seems to be a harbinger of doom, a phone call that toys with Nell’s emotions (claiming to be Chris but is actually Abalom), a hotel wall “reacting” to Nells’ face up against as she listens to a couple having sex in the next room (!), and sleep seductions. 

The gist of the film seems to be that Nell has never fully been relinquished of the hold by Abalom. Nell tries, she really does, to live a normal life, but Abalom has plans for her that could include their bonding causing the ‘end times’. The presentation is a sloppy mess, and the budget just isn’t strong enough to tell a really gutpunch supernatural story regarding an innocent caught in the trap of evil, not able to free herself, and there just isn’t a religious support system needed to help her. That’s about as good as I can do to describe it. The film’s pace, lethargic and lacking in truly telling the story about Nell’s inability to overcome Abalom, doesn’t help matters. I guess we shouldn’t have expected the sequel to rock the house, but why not just try to tell a story that embraces the viewer? Because Nell is just so creepy I think she distances herself from those watching her plight. 

Ashley Bell in this film just exudes freakshow…I guess that can work in its favor as an unintentional comedy. But I just couldn’t take the film seriously. It wasn’t even close to Linda Blair’s possession in The Exorcist, which is the vibe I got that the filmmakers wanted us to sympathize similarly to Bell’s Nell. The film also seems to promise a lot more to horror fans than it provides. Not a lot of body contorting or physical demonic nastiness, either. Even the coming of the end at the finale of the film leaves much to be desired.