Exeter

**

Are you okay?

Are you fucking kidding me, am I okay? I almost got shot by the local junkman. I caught a face full of his brain and skull. We performed an exorcism! I just got stabbed in the fucking knee with a spoon! And I just got prison shanked by a psycho demon bitch! Aside from that…sweet fucking party! Let’s do it again next week!

"Mother fucker. All I wanted was a couple of beers and a fucking blow job. And I get stuck in this bullshit." Nice line of rich dialogue from the film certain to leave you contemplating its depth of meaning.

You know the drill: a small group of young adults that hang around after a drugs-and-booze party disbands are ready-made victims for a summoned evil (demon?). The location is the ruins of a church/hospital, the perfect place to throw a shindig which involved lots of liquor, pills, weed, and other party drugs. 

Father Conway (Stephen Lang in a throwaway performance) helped “troubled youths”, and there’s a notoriety for how this church was a place for them to come and “talk it out” regarding their difficulties in this life. Patrick (Kelly Blatz) has been working at the church as a volunteer, with his younger brother, Rory (Michael Ormsby) quite the tag-along. During the party, Patrick catches his eye on the alluring “Reign” (Brittany Curran). Encouraged by his foul-mouthed friend, Brad (Brett Dier) to bone Reign, Patrick instead acts cordially towards her, interested in her for more than an easy lay. Also among the gang is the nerdy Brian (Nick Nicotera), with his handy dandy touchscreen laptop, Brad’s skank, Amber (Gage Golightly), and dopehead guitarist, Greer (Kevin Chapman). None of them are capable of handling a possession that takes control of little Rory.

 Even a “junkman” who is known to prowl the area comes to intrude upon these kids, knowing that they shouldn’t be trespassing and committing their “reckless acts”. Rory will snap his neck like a twig when he has to see what that noise upstairs is (they never learn), as Patrick had to bind the poor kid, who was entrapped with an evil, seemingly after a ritualistic levitation goes awry. The entity can pass from one body to the next after its current host is destroyed (the group dwindles as each possessed kid attacks the others). It seems, though, that Rory was the lucky kid who didn’t have to suffer death for the entity to leave him. The others in the party aren’t so lucky.

Marcus Nispel (director of the remakes for Friday the 13^th and Texas Chainsaw Massacre) offers a film that doesn’t take the name of something recognizable but the content in Exeter is derivative and formulaic.

There’s nothing you haven’t seen before, and this doesn’t have one single original bone in its body. Because of his experience, the film has style. The location is rotting on the inside with the rooms just littered with garbage and the furnishings carry the weight of abandonment (as are the windows and doors, the floors and hallways; there’s one scene that shows a toilet turned over in a hall!). This is a type of a decadent eye candy. The setting, if it looks the part of a place left to die a methodical death with age its parasite, can be a help no matter how lackluster or shopworn the plot within it is. 

Night of the Demons (1988) was what this film reminded me of. Well, except for Lang’s priest who is used just enough for a bit of exposition at the end. He has this funny scene (well the cartoonish expression on his face helps bring this on) where Lang goes through a windshield, with his head literally falling into Golightly’s lap when Brett hits him with their vehicle. Contemplating chopping him up, they are interrupted by the whole possessed kid upstairs who isn’t about to sit idle.

Primarily the majority of the film is spent with the gang trying to survive, with each falling one by one [natch] to the demon (or whatever it is) that moves from body to body with an intention to hurt, maim, and obliterate. There’s violence to spare, with a particular scene showing half of a possessed character’s face sliced off, with the eye of the hacked piece looking up! There’s a severed finger, here, and a ripped tongue, there. And even the typical exorcism [natch] has Rory’s demon withstanding a heavy amateur version of the real thing, but this bunch isn’t exactly the most pious or saintly. In fact they use a “how to” internet “easy steps” guide for exorcisms with artistic renditions of each step for visual reference! This is absurd to watch, and intentionally so. These kids have no reason to performing anything like this and Brian speaks for the audience when he recognizes this. 

The demonic presence closes all the windows and doors that could let them out (or that is hinted at, although there are places not “spiritually secured”), and the “demon-taking-the-bodies-of-those-in-attendance-due-to-messing-around-with-spiritual-mumbo-jumbo-they-should-leave-the-hell-alone” both take me back to Night/Demons. Father Conway’s “celibate slip” yielding a child does factor significantly in the final results and the twist at the end. The character of Devon is mentioned throughout, as his file is conveniently found and read by the leads. Kept in a box by Conway, his (her?) desire for revenge makes sense.

Run-of-the-mill, average, mediocre, and “same ole, same ole” could be used to describe “Exeter”. In the days of my rental store youth, movies would either have a brief theatrical life or go almost directly to video/DVD, and now you will often see the likes of Exeter pop up on ‘DirecTv cinema’ in some commercials that call attention to them. That’s how I sometimes learn about them. Just last year, Fright Night II, a sequel to remake popped up in October and quickly vanished. If a movie doesn’t emerge and make an impact of some sort, it fades into semi-obscurity. These days, as the brick and mortar rents are becoming extinct, it will be even harder for horror films to peek out of the curtains of obscurity and gain exposure. Word of mouth helps, though, and even if years accumulate, certain films can attain a status or rep that keeps them relevant. Will that be the case for Exeter? I highly doubt it.