Late to the Party: The Pope's Exorcist

Mama mia, what a motion picture.

(Late to the Party is a feature in which I watch a movie for the first time long after the discourse surrounding it has died down. Some spoilers should be expected.)

Saying The Pope’s Exorcist had “discourse surrounding it” is a bit generous. There was no discourse surrounding, related to, or even vaguely referencing The Pope’s Exorcist. It had the misfortune of opening the week after The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which somehow ended up being one of the most successful animated movies of all time, and earned an unimpressive $20 million¹ at the box office before quietly slinking away to streaming.

That might be a blessing, though, because The Pope’s Exorcist is better enjoyed at home, when you can ponder the many questions you might have about it either out loud, or via text message, as I did with a close friend who loves this kind of nonsense as much as I do and watched it with me. I won’t go so far as to say it’s a hidden gem or anything, but it does feature Russell Crowe as a PPP (pleasingly plump priest) on a Vespa to the tune of Faith No More’s “We Care a Lot,” and ends by suggesting that the titular character has been recruited for the Vatican’s version of the Avengers.

The Pope’s Exorcist is the best kind of horror movie, the kind that claims to be “based on true events.” In this case, said true events begin and end with there being a real designated Pope’s Exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth, who claimed to have performed upwards of 160,000 exorcisms in his 30-year career as a professional demonologist. Truth is subjective here: Father Gabriele wrote the book The Pope’s Exorcist is based on and presented it as factual, provided you believe that demons can be directed to leave a person’s body and possess a pig as its proxy. Either way, it gives the filmmakers the same kind of plausible deniability that the makers of the Conjuring movies had, in which they could point to the fact that there was a real couple named Ed and Lorraine Warren who claimed to be paranormal investigators. The fact that they were portrayed as a nice couple who helped people seemingly out of the goodness of their hearts rather than opportunistic con artists who fleeced gullible rubes is but mere artistic license.

ANYWAY, Crowe, using the same “you like-a da juice?” accent he used when he played Zeus in Thor: Love & Thunder, plays Father Gabriele. Unlike the dour Father Karras and the near-death Father Merrin in The Exorcist, Father Gabriele loves his job. He enters scenes of unholy degradation practically giving high fives and doesn’t drive demons back to the bowels of Hell so much as wisecrack them there. Morning zoo DJs aren’t as happy to clock in as he is. His antics often get him in trouble with the Church, however, particularly the sniveling Cardinal Sullivan (Ryan O’Grady), coded as a villain because he’s logical and doesn’t believe in such things as 3-headed sex demons who ride dragons. You know, a loser.

MEANWHILE, in rural Spain, broke widow Julia (indie horror queen Alex Essoe, just 30 but already at the playing the mother of a teenager stage of her career, hooray for Hollywood) moves from America into the centuries-old abbey left to her by her late husband. Unwillingly along for the ride is sullen “teenage” (she could be 16 or 27, who can say) daughter Amy (Laurel Marsden) and younger son Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney), so traumatized after witnessing his father’s death that he can no longer speak.

For reasons which I am not clear on, rather than stay in the U.S. and sell the abbey as a nifty little fixer-upper², Julia and the kids have elected to live in the abbey while it’s being renovated with money the audience has just been told they don’t have. This is, of course, like the Lutzes’ money problems in The Amityville Horror, just a bare-bones attempt at plot development before we get to the real reason we watch this stuff, which is demons stinking up the place and saying cuss words.

And boy, does this demon deliver! Speaking in the voice of The Green Knight’s Green Knight Ralph Ineson (meaning the only prep work he had to do was show up), it possesses little Henry and puts him through the same projectile vomiting and pustulant face sores treatment little Regan got in The Exorcist. Father Gabriele is called in to assist, evidently riding all the way from Rome to the Spanish countryside on his Vespa³ and packing his copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Exorcisms and some cannoli for the road.

Assisted by junior priest Father Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto), who has a Hitler haircut but surprisingly doesn’t turn out to be a demon working undercover or whatever, Father Gabriele expects it to be an easy job. After all, when you’ve performed 160,000 exorcisms, what’s the 160,001st, amirite? Throw a little holy water, say a couple Hail Marys, boom, done, it’s Miller Time. But this is a demon of another kind, who can perform ventriloquism and project images of topless young women to make fuck-eyes at Father Esquibel, who practically tugs at his collar like Rodney Dangerfield. It not only anticipated Father Gabriele’s arrival, it wants him there as part of an infernal plan to infiltrate the Catholic Church, just as it happened during the Spanish Inquisition, which took place right in that very abbey⁴.

Naturally, in the end, good prevails over evil. Henry is exorcised, and he and his family appear to leave the abbey directly for the nearest airport. The demon is vanquished, and though he has DEAD MEAT stamped on his forehead in 72-point Arial Black, Father Esquibel makes it to the end, where he joins forces with Father Gabriele. Together, they’re asked to join a secret Vatican task force monitoring the activity of 200 fallen angels, one of which they just sent back to Hell. The movie ends with the suggestion that there are potentially 199 sequels to The Pope’s Exorcist in the works.

This is a very silly movie.

And yet, at an hour and 45 minutes, it goes down nice and smooth, like a warm bowl of tomato soup. It asks nothing of the audience other than to accept Russell Crowe as a quirky priest who wears tinted aviator shades and flirts with nuns. And by god (no pun intended) he sells it. We had far too many years of serious Oscar bait Russell Crowe, now we’re back at campy Virtuosity-era Russell Crowe, where he bases his acting decisions on Viv Savage’s philosophy of having a good time all the time.

Leave it to Father Esquibel to look frightened, whereas even in the meant-to-be-dark and scary scenes Crowe can barely contain a cheeky grin. He knew going in that a movie that practically ends with a Predator-style “you sonovabitch!” handshake is pure horsepucky, and so horsepucky he treated it as. 199 sequels, call it the Popiverse, hell yeah, maybe they’ll do a crossover with The Fast and the Furious, why not? Maybe in the next one Father Gabriele will have slapped a “No Fat Chicks” sticker on the back of his Vespa, or he’ll be called away from vacation to exorcise a demon while wearing socks with sandals and an “FBI: Federal Bikini Inspector” t-shirt. The possibilities are endless.

I fully expected The Pope’s Exorcist to be a silly movie, and it was. But it’s a lovably silly movie that checks off every box for fans of demonic possession movies. Contorted bodies? Check. Words scratched into the skin of the possessed person? Check. Demon taunting the priests with some dark, shameful secret⁵ it knows about them? Check and check. Weird black sludge? Chee-yeck. It’s got it all, plus Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone” on the soundtrack, and someone saying the line “I read it in La Madre de Dio magazine,” which I can’t help but wonder if it has a swimsuit issue.

Do I regret not seeing it in a theater? No, I suspect that run time would have been more apparent if I was a captive audience. Do I regret watching it in the comfort of my own home while texting stuff like “I got some innocent flesh you can ruin, Ralph” to one of my closest friends? Not in the slightest. On that level, The Pope’s Exorcist is a five-star motion picture.

1. It could have been worse, though: its new release competitors that week were Renfield, which made jack, and Mafia Mamma, which made shit.

2. Which can then be flipped and sold to a former day trader and his pottery teacher wife, who will turn it into a lovely bed and breakfast (although I guess in Spain that would be a casa y desayuno).

3. No big, it’s only a 20-hour trip.

4. Which means now the casa y desayuno can have a fun theme! The torture dungeon can be turned into a spa, because beauty is pain, you know?

5. Although without spoiling anything both Father Gabriele and Father Esquibel’s shameful secrets are pretty tame stuff, especially considering what we know about the actual Catholic Church.