Nobody has improved the 1973 classic

 THE POPE'S EXORCIST (2023)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"The Pope's Exorcist" is hardly an original piece of work and nothing, not one iota or drop of narrative thread, is new or exciting or remotely scary about this movie. It is also unintentionally funny and essentially rips-off all the iconic imagery and some William Peter Blatty lines of dialogue from "The Exorcist" - of course, demonic possession movies have done this forever in the last 50 years. This one is just louder than most.

This is based on a true story of the late Father Amorth, a chief exorcist who may have believed in exorcisms and the presence of evil yet also knew mental illness and trauma could be contributing factors in any alleged possession. Such thoughts from Amorth are quickly abandoned when a young male child is the latest possession case. The bony, sickly looking child is Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) and is the son of Julia Vasquez (Alex Essoe - looking merely distraught through all this). There is the also the terminally annoyed older sister (Laurel Marsden) who flips her mother the bird! Incidentally, both kids listen to their walkmans and have no interest in moving in to a creepy, inhospitable Spanish abbey passed on to them by their late father. Naturally all the action is inside the abbey and literally fireworks go off rather prematurely in this movie when a fireball nearly consumes two construction workers! I would say in the fine, disreputable tradition of creepy houses, abbeys or apartments in the "Amityville Horror" vein, "GET OUT!"   

Russell Crowe plays the bearded Father Amorth in pretty much the way you expect - humorous, wicked and completely over-the-top. He's the saving grace of this overwrought, overdone and hysterical movie that bears little resemblance to the Father Amorth as seen in William Friedkin's chilling documentary, "The Devil and Father Amorth." This movie may as well be about any priest and the family in crisis demon mode lack any measurable depth or identity - they are in trouble before we have had any time to get to know them. As a late-night potboiler horror/possession movie, "The Pope's Exorcist" will satisfy anyone who loves twisting necks, kids hurling obscenities, blood gushing out of mouths, levitations and pigs blown away by shotguns with a slight touch of theology. In 50 years, though, nobody has yet to improve on that 1973 classic.