While the found footage genre has definitely deserved some of the hate it has gotten over the years, it angers me that films about exorcisms and the conspiracies of The Vatican, which are more uniformly awful than the former, don't seem to get the widespread hate that found footage films do. Whenever a new found footage film hits theaters, it's dismissed almost instantly of a retread of familiar ground, yet films concerning the Catholic church don't get the same sort of dismissal (perhaps because they are now appearing in less and less theaters and more on the direct-to-DVD market?)
Whatever the case, Joe Marino's The Vatican Exorcisms adds to the scrapheap of lackluster exorcism films, a genre that some thirty years ago seemed fresh and limitless, but now, is as predictable and as frightening as a child jumping out of bushes shouting "boo" in the middle of the afternoon. The film's DVD release is positioned ever-so closely to the limited theatrical release of another film titled The Vatican Tapes (unseen by me, as of now), undoubtedly to cause a sense of consumer confusion (or perhaps market saturation) of a genre of films that peaked with its first major hit in 1973 and has yet to impress on a level even remotely close to its grandfather.
This is one of those mockumentaries (fake documentaries) that tries to get you to believe what you're seeing is real footage, but because the approach (the constant iteration of showing the truth and assertion that the director and crew are making a movie) and the structure are so generic, any elements of originality are sacrificed for routine storytelling. We follow director Joe Marino as he travels to Italy with the goal of exposing the many crimes of The Vatican, including the disappearance of young women, Satanic rituals, orgies, and exorcisms, all of which the church has worked to cover up. By his side is exorcism-expert Padre Luigi, who helps Marino piece together the plethora of paranormal activity that occurs and how The Vatican has managed to be so secretive when it comes to profiling these incidents.
The film does find itself a tad unsettling during some of the Satanic rituals because of the way Marino and his crew choose to capture them. The scenes themselves don't always come equipped with a payoff, and sometimes, for extended periods of time, we are voyeurs into the noneventful rituals, passively waiting for something to occur while there is limited dialog and an eerie presence of silence. This effect is quite stimulating, actually; a relieving break from the horror films that constantly feel the need to work towards something rather than having a more liberal structure to showcase their events.
The effect, while admittedly unsettling for the first few scenes, becomes a grating one very quickly, even for a film that barely qualifies as a feature (without credits, the film is roughly seventy-four minutes). Even with this concise runtime, The Vatican Exorcisms plods along from one ridiculous, foreseeable scene to the next; how many films do we need to see that involve innocent people contorting themselves on the floor of a church in front of numerous bystanders, and how many of them do we need to see that are so theatrical they cannot even bear the element of being believable.
Exorcism films are films, from what I've seen, with no staying power whatsoever. Slasher films give you an uneasiness at night, films about wild animals make you weary of the woods, and films that go beyond the realm of reality into your subconscious make lying down to to go to a sleep a bit more difficult. Exorcism films are so conventionally made and arbitrarily concocted that there's little to make you fear other than the fact that you're losing time by watching yet another one, and Joe Marino's The Vatican Exorcisms is a result of undisciplined and unambitious mockumentary fluff.
Directed by: Joe Marino.
