The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

               With a movie like this it’s hard to figure out exactly what the filmmakers were trying to do.  There are at least three distinct kinds of story wrapped around each other here attempting to make it seem like one coherent 100-minute narrative is being told.  A lot of this fractured identity is probably down to good old market-tested four-quadrant appeal, stealing as many of the obvious parts from as many of the currently popular genres as feasible and smashing them together.  What I’m really wondering, though, is whether these disparate parts, by working together, are distracting us from the movie’s real intention: a fairly dark goal of rehabbing the image and history of the Catholic Church.

Way classier a title card than the movie deserves.

              That’s a pretty bold statement to make, so let’s take a step back and look at the people involved here.  It all starts with the script, which in this case was produced by a whole menagerie.  First off, it’s based on the memoirs ‘An Exorcist Tells His Story’ and ‘An Exorcist: More Stories’ by the real-life Vatican exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth.  He really was a high-ranking Catholic exorcist from 1986 until he retired in 2000.  As an interesting side-note, the director of ‘The Exorcist,’ William Friedkin, made a not-very-well received 2017 documentary called ‘The Devil and Father Amorth.’  I think we’ll just take it as read that the movie is based more on the idea of his memoirs than anything actually contained within them.

              We have two separate sets of writers, one credited as ‘screen story by’ and the other as ‘screenplay by.’  Way more than the five people listed here worked on this script, the Writer’s Guild arbitration must have been a hoot.  If I had to guess, and I do since I don’t know the answer, I suspect that when the production company Screen Gems bought the rights to the books in 2020 they had a number of up-and-comers take some whacks at an adaptation for cheap.  This included R. Dean McCreary and Chester Hastings, co-writers of a 2019 movie named ‘Fanboy,’ and Jeff Katz, a movie and tv producer who apparently took a shot at writing in 2020.  Enough of their ideas stuck around to be credited in the final product.  The backgrounds of the next two writers, with the fancier ‘screenplay by’ credit, might explain the kind of genre fracturing that makes up this movie.  First we have Michael Petroni, who has an interesting filmography.  He’s bounced between straight drama (‘The Book Thief’), horror (‘Backtrack’), and even another exorcism movie (‘The Rite’).  Sharing credit with him is Evan Spiliotopoulos, who started out writing cheap direct-to-video Disney dreck in the early 2000’s and later graduated to more expensive theatrical Disney dreck with ‘Beauty and the Beast (2017),’ as well as ‘Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins.’  Mind you, Petroni also did ‘The Queen of the Damned,’ so nobody gets to look down on anyone else here.

              Director Julius Avery was apparently not the first person hired for that role, though the small amount of research I was willing to do didn’t turn up who he replaced.  Having made a decent impression with the 2018 World War Two zombie-Nazi movie ‘Overlord’ (notice the hybrid genre), he went on to direct the 2022 Sylvester Stallone superhero movie ‘Samaritan,’ and then this.  It’s an interesting trajectory that mirrors those young directors swallowed up by Disney and Warner Brothers to helm their formula blockbusters, just on a smaller scale.  It also explains the genre mixing, he’d been doing that since ‘Overlord.’  It’s interesting that with the Nazi zombies he kept the tone as serious as he could while in ‘The Pope’s Exorcist’ he leaned the other way, nudging all the way up against outright goofiness. 

              The screenplay, shall we say loosely adapted from reality, tells the story of exorcist Father Amorth and a particularly difficult exorcism.  He’s introduced to us while he’s being grilled by the gutless bureaucrats of the Vatican, who question his methods.  He is then sent to Spain by the Pope himself to investigate the possession of a young boy.  The boy, an American, has recently moved with his mom and sister into an abandoned abbey left to them by his late father.  The demon possessing him has specifically requested Father Amorth himself show up.  The Father teams up with a local priest, Father Esquibel, and they learn that it’s such a powerful demon that they need its name to defeat it.  They investigate the abbey and find an underground chamber full of the ancient corpses of members of the Spanish Inquisition.  They discover that centuries ago the demon had possessed an exorcist and thus led the Inquisition in a reign of terror.  The Church eventually sealed the demon in the abbey, but it has now escaped and wants to possess Father Amorth in order to take over the Vatican and thus the world.  After a series of struggles Father Amorth allows the demon to possess him in order to save the boy, then with Father Esquibel’s help and its true name they finally banish the demon once and for all.  It ends with a sequel-hook for more adventures.

              If it sounds like the movie is all over the place, that’s because it is.  Let’s go through the most obvious different kinds of stories included here.  First there’s a priestly variation on a cop movie, where the rogue detective who breaks the rules but gets results has the mayor for a friend and so gets assigned the really difficult cases.  He gets stuck with a partner he’s not sure about, but then they go through some troubles, they save each other’s lives a few times, and in the end they earn each other’s respect.  There’s even a scene at the finale where the partners warmly shake hands and say it’s time to get back to work.

              Next there’s your standard exorcism movie, which doesn’t make up as much of the runtime as you’d think.  We get an ancient abbey whose renovation cracks a seal in the basement, freeing a demon who possesses a young boy.  He does the usual demonic child schtick, talks all low and spooky, vomits things up, hurts himself, contorts himself and runs around all weird, classic stuff.  Eventually a priest frees the boy from the demon by allowing it to posses himself, at which point the boy and his family are bundled into a car and completely exit the movie, never to be seen again.  This exorcism is kind of the entire point of the intellectual property, it’s what Screen Gems bought the rights for so it’s gotta stay in, but it sure can be deemphasized.

              Then there’s the third movie, which is an Indiana Jones-styles action-adventure.  We have a scholar digging into ancient lore and finding ultimate evil.  Our heroes investigate a covered well and find a skull-lined passage to an underground cavern.  They discover long-lost corpses and forbidden texts that warn of ancient horrors.  They’re pursued by an evil foe with supernatural powers but fight back with their own knowledge and skills.  They struggle back and forth with the demon, the fate of the world at stake.  All seems lost when one of them is possessed and begins to fly and the walls begin to glow.  But then his friend rallies and together they seal the hole in reality torn where one of two-hundred angels, cast out after Lucifer’s rebellion, struck the earth.  It ends with ancient tomes in hand, a map to the other one hundred and ninety-nine fallen angels in their possession, and a newly-formed Vatican order set up to support them.  It makes me completely happy that it’s already been confirmed we’re getting the sequel that this ending overtly demands.

              There are shards of other movies in there as well, maybe fragments left over from the who-knows how many other writers who took a swing at it.  There are shadows of what might have been an attempt at a straight drama, as in several scenes Father Amorth ruminates on his guilt about a girl he believes he failed and struggles with being too prideful.  There’s this odd strain of almost nerd humor meta logic, where it establishes that demons can sense your sins and attack you through them, gaining knowledge about you and influence over you through the weakness of a sinful state.  Since confession absolves all sin, if they face the demon freshly-confessed there’s nothing it can grab onto.  This leads to this series of scenes where the two priests take turns confessing to each other.  This small comedy of errors emerges as they negotiate between themselves about what is and isn’t a sin, what is and isn’t actual repentance, with the demon coming in as a chaotic third voice to spin them off again.  There’s also some decent CGI action, I guess.

              What this mish-mash means is that it’s a jumbled mess of conflicting genres and tones that ends up being pretty decent brainless fun, if that’s what you’re after.  It has a bunch of parts tumbled together in the shape of a movie held together by the fact that Russell Crowe is in the middle of it clearly having a blast.  A lot of words have been written recently by people wringing their hands about whatever happened to Russell Crowe, given his ongoing run of mid-budget movies, and I think it’s fairly obvious: he got old and calmed down.  The man has won Oscars, he’s starred in tentpole blockbusters, he’s been a star for thirty years, I think the man just wants to stretch a little and have some fun.  What in the world does he have left to prove?  In this movie he gets to have a ridiculous Italian accent and drive a little moped, he can keep his hands busy with endless little priestly trinkets and wear silly costumes.  This had to have been a lot of fun to make.

              Which is all well and good, but when your movie begins as a couple of very pro-Catholic books detailing an explicit belief in a literal interpretation of demonic evil, you either adapt it while being careful about what you do and don’t imply about morals and ethics or you just flail around with no concern for what you’re saying.  Which is what I believe this movie did.

              When I detailed the people behind this movie, I left out a pretty big group: the production companies.  This is a Sony film put together by TSG Entertainment, so at least we don’t have a flurry of production company artwork at the start.  A lot of smaller movies have to cobble together their budgets from whoever is offering, so the first twenty seconds are often spent watching a series of corporate logos you’ve never seen before, but here there are only two main companies.  The first is 2.0 Entertainment, headed by Doug Belgrad.  They’re involved in a ton of productions like ‘Bad Boys 4 Life,’ ‘Zombieland: Double Tap,’ and ‘Charlie’s Angels (2019).’  An IP machine, this one.  The other company is Loyola Productions, a non-profit set up by and officially connected to the Jesuit order, which explains a lot.  The head of Loyola Productions, Edward Siebert, has the final Executive Producer credit during the title sequence of ‘The Pope’s Exorcist.’

              It’s also rather important to note that Father Amorth was a member of The Society of Saint Paul, an officially recognized clerical congregation dedicated to directly serving the Pope and which was founded to "evangelize with the modern tools of communications".

              I’m generally annoyed by horror movies that try to pretend that the supernatural things they show are in any way based on reality.  The inherent falsity of film is such that even the most accurate portrayal of anything is going to be compromised somehow in order to be more cinematic or simply coherent.  By the simple nature of having a camera record things, elements are inevitably being left out or overemphasized by the visuals.  When it’s werewolves and vampires, whatever.  When it’s something as nebulous as ghosts and poltergeists, eh, annoying but mostly harmless.  Belief in demonic possession, though, is something that actually harms people’s lives.  It’s good that the closest they get to claiming that what’s shown on screen really happened is during the trailer, when it claims the movie was “inspired by the actual files.”  But it would obviously like you to think they’re telling you a true story.

They get a lot of little things wrong, like implying he was an active exorcist until his death in 2016 when he retired in 2000.  There’s a small running joke about Amorth being slightly hurt when it turns out that people haven’t read his books, insisting, “The books are good.”  The first book he ever wrote was his memoir, originally published in 1990.  This movie is set in 1987.  The movie asserts that he was the ‘Chief Exorcist to the Vatican,’ which is an overstatement.  Father Amorth was the founder of The International Association of Exorcists (Associazione internazionale degli esorcisti) but not until 1990, at which time it was made up of six whole priests.  In 1987 he was indeed an exorcist, but simply one assigned to the Diocese of Rome.  This meant that while technically The Pope was his assigned Bishop, that doesn’t mean he was accountable only to him.  Rome’s chief exorcist at the time was Candido Amantini, who did in fact mentor Amorth.

Also The Pope, and that’s the character’s credited name, not John Paul II, is played by Franco Nero, who’s always great to see, but we know who was pope in 1987 and he didn’t have a beard.

              Those things are fine, adaptations are going to adapt.  What troubles me is the way it portrays the operations of the Church and how its depiction of demons and their machinations directly confirms that the Catholic version of Christianity is correct and that the Church is our only hope against the forces of evil.  They collapse the incredible bureaucracy and levels of authority that the Vatican has encircled itself with, built up over the centuries like layers of enamel on a clam, to a single panel of tetchy pencil-pushers who get in Amorth’s way but which can be safely defied because he has the ear of The Pope.  The Pope himself, meanwhile, is only ever seen in a small chapel, constantly praying.  He and Father Amorth discuss The Pope’s intermittent illness, useful for later in the movie when the priests are struggling against the demon and The Pope can dramatically collapse in apparent spiritual sympathy.  They also both sneer at those in the church who would doubt his benevolence or question their actions.  To be clear, the movie hates oversight committees, loves absolute theocratic rulers.

              All throughout their history exorcism movies have been fairly inherently pro-Catholic.  Unless it’s supposed to be ambiguous whether there really is a demon, the existence of the supernatural and the demonstrated ability of Catholic priests to successfully combat it lends credence to a whole mess of Church doctrine.  Better movies like ‘The Exorcist’ play around with this idea, interrogating the implications of demonic possession and portraying the people involved as real, flawed people.  More recent movies like ‘The Conjuring’ series offload a lot of this baggage by making psychics the natural enemies of demons, dropping any kind of coherent theology in favor of jump scares and pat screenplay psychology.

              What’s interesting about ‘The Pope’s Exorcist’ is that they do incorporate some nuance into the movie.  Amorth stresses several times that most of the people he sees don’t need exorcisms, they simply need counseling or medication.  The bureaucratic trouble he got in at the beginning of the movie was for pretending too well to perform an exorcism when it was just a show for a troubled teenager.  This is a classic wind-up technique, agreeing with critics on a lot of their points to seem reasonable and then using that supposed reasonableness to double down on the idea that the stuff they’re talking about is different, though.

              But not only are we dealing with a real demon here, we’ve got one who’s been around a while and has a history with the Church itself.  By now everyone is aware that the Spanish Inquisition was bad news.  Most people don’t quite understand how long it went on (technically 355 years) or that it was only one of three major inquisitions (there were also the Roman and Portuguese Inquisitions).  What this movie tries to get away with is saying that the only reason The Spanish Inquisition did so many horrible things is that the head of the Inquisition was possessed by the demon Asmodeus and thus really all the bad stuff was the fault of demons, not the Church.

              The implications this has for the bad things The Church has been accused of more recently logically follow.

              To put it mildly, this is all pretty ballsy.  They keep going, too, saying that the demon was one of the original 200 angels cast out from Heaven, and that it specifically demanded to see Father Amorth because it intends to posses him, return to the Vatican and … take it over?  Not sure if the intent there is to jump into The Pope himself or just influence everyone there.  Either way, the Catholic Church gets a big credibility boost from the demons themselves acknowledging that the Catholic Church is the one true interpretation of our cosmological and spiritual place in the the universal order.  Seems churlish to bring up all of those abuse allegations when they’re fighting to keep us safe from literal demons.

              I don’t mean to overstate, I doubt that most of the people involved in this movie saw it as a story that justified the continued existence and relevancy of The Church, I think they just wanted to make a pulpy adventure story about a fun priest going up against a super demon and kept adding elements they thought were cool.  Nothing about the filmography of the director or any of the writers indicates that they were putting together anything other than high-level schlock.

              Loyola Productions, though, and Ignatius Press, who published Amorth’s books, definitely have an interest in making the movie as pro-Catholic as possible.  I don’t have access to any of the legal details on the rights, or proof that Loyola Productions forced any kind of ideology on the movie.  None of the interviews or articles mention anything like that, nor where there any complaints by those involved, so I’m sure nothing hostile or overt was demanded, but I suspect at the very least there was an agreement to not criticize the Church too awful much.  I wonder if the idea to absolve the Church of the sins of the Inquisition was a screenwriter’s idea or baked into the story from the beginning?  The most I feel comfortable in alleging is that the Church, realizing they had a valuable property in this archive of Amorth’s writings, fished around with it for a few years after his death with some basic stipulations on how it could and could not be adapted and got Screen Gems to bite.  The priest has to be Catholic, the demon has to be powerful, and the Catholic Church has to be the way to fight it.  As long as those factors are kept intact they get the portrayal of the Church they want, and what’s the point of buying the rights to the books of Father Amorth if you don’t want to keep those elements?

              On a more positive note, there are also a ton of delightful little moments that were included that didn’t have to be.  Father Esquibel originally hides a couple of his sins from confession, allowing the demon to cloud his mind, causing their first exorcism attempt to end when Equibel starts strangling the possessed boy.  Didn’t expect to see a grown man trying to murder a little kid, that was fun.  The Vatican bureaucrat who was hassling Amorth the most randomly witnesses Jesus bleeding on a crucifix and dramatically collapses to his knees in a crisis of faith, which was amusing.  There’s a neat little trick where Amorth verifies that the kid is really possessed by waving a Saint Benedict Medal back and forth in front of his eyes until the demon’s pupils become unsynced from the boy’s.  The well lined with skulls is visually interesting.

              Per the wiki the movie made roughly $75 million on a budget of $18 million, and that’s before VOD and blu-ray numbers.  It’s exactly the kind of mid-budget feature that we don’t get enough of, a solid little genre picture that made its money back and more than enough of a profit to justify another one.  My concerns about its theology aside, I really enjoyed this movie.  It’s dumb and schlocky but in a fun way.  It has limited goals but one of them is to just be entertaining, and I think it succeeds.  I like the idea of Russell Crowe entering into his 60’s by embracing his inner character actor.  The movie ends with the idea that Amorth has a new mission, to track down the other 199 fallen angels, and while I don’t know that we’re going to get an even 200 of these I certainly wouldn’t mind another couple, although maybe with less Catholic apologia.

Dark August (1976)

              I wasn’t around at the time but by all accounts, 1976 was a pretty weird year to live through, culturally.  The highest-selling album was ‘Frampton Comes Alive.’  The second highest-grossing movie was the Barbara Streisand / Kris Kristofferson ‘A Star is Born.’  The book Trinity by Leon Uris, which was about Irish history leading up to The Troubles and I’m sure has aged gracefully, topped the bestseller list.   Ford vs. Carter.  The death of Mao Zedong.  There was an Olympics in there.  There was plenty going on but none of it seems to have exactly lingered in the public consciousness.  The world did get five new episodes of ‘Columbo,’ though.

              It was also far enough past the sixties that the hangover had well and truly settled in.  Whatever fuzzy energy had built up to explode in 1969 had dissipated into the aether and the world seemed to have embraced its burnt-orange and avocado colored fate.  The non-fiction bestseller list was full of titles like Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life, the tv schedule was littered with nostalgia like ‘Happy Days’ and ‘Laverne and Shirley,’ Tom Wolfe coined the term “The ‘Me’ Decade” to describe the inward turn culture seemed to have taken.  After what had seemed like a decade of working towards something important the 70’s curdled into a slow inward collapse as people shrank inside themselves, turning insular in their search for meaning.

              It wasn’t all like that, of course.  I mentioned ‘A Star is Born’ above as the second-highest grossing movie of the year because the actual highest-grossing was ‘Rocky,’ and any year that can turn that out isn’t completely bad.  Bowie put out ‘Station to Station,’ Agatha Christie hit the bestseller list twice, there was plenty of culture there for people who wanted it, but the sad, almost pleading quasi-horror at the center of 1976’s ‘Dark August’ is so palpably a product of its time that I’d like to think I’d have pegged the year it was released just by watching it cold.

              Directed by Martin Goldman, who also co-wrote the script with its two stars J.J. Barry and Caroline Shelyne, ‘Dark August’ was made on a palpably shoestring budget in Stowe, Vermont, which today claims to be “the ski capital of the East” but at the time seems to have been a sleepy little tourist town where a former ad-agency executive turned filmmaker could own a vacation cabin and work out some personal issues through making a film. 

              Although he has a pretty thin filmography Martin Goldman’s background in the industry is pretty interesting.  Like the main character of this movie, named Sal Devito and played by J.J. Barry, Goldman spent time in the New York advertising world working on and designing national advertising campaigns before stepping up to directing commercials and eventually feature films.  He was the director of a 1972 Paramount Productions film starring Fred Williamson, the name of which you get to look up yourself.  He then went independent for this movie, which only had a small distribution almost entirely in the South for reasons that remain unclear.  Basically lost to obscurity for years, it has become relatively more available due to its 2019 2K remaster and reissue as part of the ‘American Horror Project Vol. 2’ box set.  It’s here where I have to admit that I don’t have access to this resissue or its numerous features, which includes a director’s commentary, so understand that almost everything I say in regard to this movie is missing any direct input from the filmmakers, which is available.  Like so many good things it also exists to be enjoyed on Tubi, as well as Shudder at the time of writing.

Metaphorically accurate, I guess.

              Two of the main actors are worth noting as well.  J.J. Barry was a comedic character actor who popped up as a somewhat featured player on ‘Rowen & Martin’s Laugh-In,’ had some guest spots on ‘Barney Miller,’ ‘The Love Boat,’ and even led a short-run sitcom in 1972’s ‘The Corner Bar.’  There’s also Kim Hunter, playing a psychic named Adrianna Putnam, who takes over the last third of the movie.  Hunter won an Academy Award as Stella opposite Marlon Brando in 1951’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’  By this point in her career she’d settled into steady television work and reportedly took the part because of her own interest in paranormal matters.  Both of these actors and in fact most of the cast are very good in this movie.  There are a lot of things to criticize here but the acting isn’t one of them.

              It’s odd to say about an ostensible horror movie but the supernatural and scary parts of the movie are the least important and least interesting.  The story is essentially ‘Pumpkinhead’ minus the special effects and tension.  The premise is extremely straightforward: before the events of the movie our main character killed a young girl in a car accident.  As it opens her grandfather casts a curse on him seeking revenge.  After a series of escalating events our protagonist Sal seeks out the help of a local witch.  The cleansing ceremony is interrupted by the grandfather who kills the psychic and is then killed by the demon he’d summoned.  The movie ends shortly thereafter on a very ambiguous note.

              This is basically all that actually happens in the movie.  At eight-six minutes it’s not a very long film.  There are a few scenes of near action: there’s a panic attack at a store, a character accidently saws into their own leg, Sal chases a robed figure through the woods, a character is attacked by the grandfather while she’s investigating his house, but except for these and some very brief violence at the séance the movie is deliberately slow and formal.  It’s much more interested in the situation Sal finds himself in and how he reacts to what’s happening in his life than any of the mechanics of the plot.  Nothing definitively paranormal actually happens in this movie, there’s absolutely nothing that couldn’t technically exist in a straightforward drama, although the supernatural intent is clear, just a victim of budget.

Let’s address the things that almost work.  The most obvious is the directing and cinematography, which most of the time is pretty darn good.  The movie starts with an opening shot of a house with the title card, then cuts to a slow pan over various bits and pieces of string, fabric, candles, and assorted nick-nacks as the grandfather character slowly speaks a rather garbled curse over a blippy bloopy electronic soundtrack underscored by insistent jazz drums.  All we see are closeups of matches, fingers, his mouth speaking, and then his hands as he caresses what seems to be a ball of wax.  While overlong it does well in establishing a suitably creepy tone.  This is followed by more precise shots as a jeep arrives at a house, then we watch as Jackie, Sal’s girlfriend, exits the jeep and goes inside and starts making breakfast while Sal finishes a shower.  It’s important to note that the camera motions are very slow and controlled throughout, the framing deliberate.  It establishes a visual motif that continues throughout the movie of shots starting on a frame empty of actors, establishing a space, then the actors will either move into that space or the camera will move to find the actors.  Lots of wide, still shots as action happens in the distance or as actors move from one side of the frame to the other.  It’s hardly action-packed but it does a very good job of grounding us in a sense of place throughout.

              This stands in pretty sharp contrast to any time the camera has to convey movement from place to place or any sense that time has passed.  If it’s a static scene with simple blocking and a couple of central characters the movement is fluid and deliberate, picking careful compositions and establishing meaning through movement.  The second someone has to pick up a camera everything goes wobbly and it starts crashing from edit to edit, losing any sense of geography or internal consistency.  The section where Sal wanders through the woods is completely incomprehensible.  There’s a montage of the two main characters in bed that attempts to convey that time is passing but comes off more as a parody of artsy editing.  Scenes tend to start in the middle with almost no establishing shots so as the plot continues we get very little sense of how each scene relates to the ones before.  Sometimes we get conversational cues as to how much time has passed but most of the time we don’t.  If we’re lucky we’ll get a moody shot of a sunset to indicate that a day is ending. 

About as horrific as it gets.

              Rural Vermont seems like a pretty fascinating place to shoot in but the movie only partly takes advantage of it.  Although a few scenes do take place in the forest it’s palpable how uncomfortable the filmmaking becomes when it’s out of doors.  The locations are almost entirely interiors of obviously real places and there’s an immense fascination to be found in the details of the time period.  There’s a scene set in the town general store that I could spend all day studying frames of.  From the bike hanging in the window to the haphazard spread of shelves holding brands that were obviously not cleared by legal, tourists checking out t-shirts in the background interspersed with apparent locals just there for staples, it’s this raw slice of 1976 commerce that seems endlessly interesting.  When they can park the camera in the middle of a field and focus on a car slowly winding its way down a dirt road you get some sense of the countryside, but that’s about it.

              Hand-in-hand with the acting I’ll also give some limited praise to the dialogue and scene construction.  I suspect that the writing credits spread between the director and the two leads reflects the fact that a lot of the script was workshopped during production.  Again, this is a question to which the answer exists but that I don’t have access to, so be aware I could be completely wrong, this is just how it seems to me.  There’s a lot of 1970’s naturalistic acting here and most of the time it works.  We’re given very little flat exposition, characters and situations are simply referred to and the movie expects us to be able to follow along and pick up the details as we go, and given the limited setting and premise this isn’t difficult at all.  The contours of the characters’ lives, their relations to each other, and what the ongoing conflicts are essentially make up the first half of the movie, after which the curse plot takes over.  The main focus is on Sal and he’s an interesting enough character, sympathetic if also selfish and short-tempered.  It’s not that difficult to spend just under an hour and a half with him.

              The majority of the problems with the movie involve the underlying conceit, that this is a supernatural tale of revenge.  The grandfather character, who opens the movie with his curse and whose actions drive everything, is such a tertiary character that he makes little to no impression on the narrative.  To a certain extent this seems by design, and his inclusion in the margins of scenes is often effective.  He’ll be glimpsed through windows, or in the backgrounds of shots, he’s referred to by the other characters in asides, it’s not like his presence isn’t felt, but about halfway through the movie he’s directly confronted by our main character and basically doesn’t react.  It’s at this point that you’d expect to hear his side, his justification for enacting his revenge for the death of his granddaughter, but aside from some mumbled dialogue he’s completely without characterization and you realize that he’s basically just a plot point, something for Sal to struggle against.  Since he’s basically absent as a source of menace and there’s nothing to replace him as an active threat there’s no real sense of danger, just a kind of unsatisfying malaise to everything that dovetails well with the emotions of our characters but doesn’t exactly scream fright fest.  The focus shifts from the curse we witnessed in the opening minutes to how this is just one more thing causing problems for Sal.

Just hangin' out, waiting on that curse.

So if the horror movie isn’t really a horror movie, what kind of movie is it?  To me the most indicative moment happens just under eleven minutes in.  After that opening where we establish the curse and meet the characters there’s some business with a phone call from Sal’s boss at the ad agency in New York and a brief conversation establishing that he has a friend named Theo and that Sal’s girlfriend Jackie runs an art gallery.   The two of them decide to go for a drive.  There’s a very brief interlude where Sal hears their dog whining, he looks around and briefly sees a hooded figured watching him from the woods that disappears between edits, he looks distressed, then we’re in the art gallery and they’re trading conversational snippets about the paintings there.  Jackie makes a joke that causes Sal to take a beat then pull her close.  He says the following monologue which, as I said, pretty much sums up the entire thing.

“Baby, when I was a kid, my father used to take us for drives in the country.  To him Jackson Heights was the country.  When we used to take these drives I always used to image a great, white horse running alongside the car.  This great stallion with its mane flowing would follow us wherever we went.  Whether it’s in tunnels, over bridges, on highways, that great, white horse would be there.  You know what?  You’re the only other person I know in the world that owns one.”

Later on a white horse in a field is used as a scene transition, and later still it’s shown running from a fire Sal sets.  It’s that kind of movie.

This is not a difficult metaphor to decipher, so let’s just dive in.  This is, at base, a story about a guy going through a mid-life crisis as he tries desperately to recapture the artistic inspiration he felt as a child but apparently neglected up to this point in his life.  The backstory that gradually trickles out during the narrative is that about a year before the movie starts Sal left his wife and kids, moved from New York City to rural Vermont, started living with Jackie, and is desperately trying to start his life over.  He’s shown to be an artist, seated at a drawing board (he’s drawing a horse instead of working on the ad copy covering the rest of the surface, this movie isn’t trying to hide what it’s doing), his girlfriend runs an art gallery, his best friend used to be a lawyer but quit to go into pottery, the best friend’s girlfriend is into tarot and witchcraft, this is all very much part and parcel of the ‘find yourself’ mantra that ran desperately through so much of the 1970’s. 

The movie gets very direct about it.  In one scene his wife calls him from New York and they argue.  We only hear his side of the conversation, during which he angrily insists he in fact does know what his responsibilities are, he does care about her and the kids, but that kind of life just isn’t in him, that kind of station-wagon existence, this is just something he has to do because he’s almost forty and this is the last shot he has.  Immediately after this he sees the hooded figure again and chases it into the woods to yell at it, asking what it wants.  Again, movie’s pretty open in what it’s doing.

Horse.

The dialogue explicitly establishes Sal as being 39 years old, about to turn 40, and several times characters refer to him as someone who never quite grew up.  There’s a scene where Sal and Jackie have a conversation that starts with the line “How can you accept someone without first judging them?” and doesn’t improve much from there.  In a couple of scenes it’s established that Sal is building himself a small studio and is advised to burn it down to help drive away the demon.  Not a lot may happen in this movie but what does happen is very deliberate and usually very obvious.

Therefore whether or not this movie succeeds for you really comes down to how invested you are in the inner life and struggles of one Sal Devito, and he’s not a completely uninteresting character.  He’s charming enough, he’s shown to be a fairly talented artist, he seems to genuinely love and appreciate Jackie, he has some good friends, the accident that killed the little girl really wasn’t his fault and for which he does seems sorry about, this is not a bad person we’re talking about here.

But.  And it’s a pretty big but.  He is shown to be incredibly selfish in a way that the movie doesn’t quite seem to recognize.  The first and largest strike against him is that he ran out on his family.  When he argues with his wife on the phone we’re only shown his side of the conversation, so we only get his arguments.  I don’t think any of the arguments he makes are worth anything but I’m not sure the movie agrees.  His side consists almost entirely of pointing out that he wasn’t happy, wasn’t feeling fulfilled, insists he’s fully aware of his responsibilities while perched in a cabin miles away from his children, puts the decision on whether or not to get a divorce entirely on her, I find none of this convincing but the way the scene is shot and the way Sal is portrayed I get the impression that we’re supposed to be on his side. 

Then there’s the early scene between Sal and his friend Theo which seems like a throwaway exposition scene at the time but in retrospect pretty much lays out the conflict of the movie.  Sal complains to Theo about a series of unspecified ‘attacks’ he’s been having since being cleared over the accident.  He suspects the grandfather is somehow behind it, which would seem to lead to an exploration of the curse and the spookiness going on but instead this gets dropped for about the next forty-five minutes.  He complains that the grandfather is always around, looking at him, and what’s he supposed to do, leave town?  He refuses, he’s paid too many dues to get there.  His friend rather correctly points out that the grandfather is not just going to get over his granddaughter being killed, and the scene kind of peters out from there.  What’s basically established is that Sal is resentful that the grandfather is always around as a reminder of his mistakes and a source of guilt.  What’s odd is that the movie doesn’t seem at all interested in interrogating this point.  As already established the grandfather isn’t really a character.  There’s an entire scene that builds up to an explosive confrontation between the two of them that gathers a crowd and eventually the attention of the sheriff, but the grandfather doesn’t react and simply wanders away afterwards.  The movie really only has room to examine Sal’s side, and considering we open with a demon-summoning ritual I don’t really think the movie assumes we’re that sympathetic to the grandfather.  

This scene is so ... goddamn ... long.

Again, there’s an entire director’s commentary that might say the opposite, that we’re supposed to feel over the course of the movie that Sal has in some way earned this punishment, that the curse is directly about the death of the little girl but more generally a result of his selfishness.  Maybe the grandfather is such a side character because the curse is just one more problem that Sal has managed to bring on himself.  This is a very plausible interpretation of events and all I can say against it is that over the course of the movie I felt like it was taking Sal’s side.  Maybe a second viewing would change my mind.

All of this is why I’m making the pretty obvious assumption that what this movie is really about is the director taking stock of his own life.  The parallels between the main character’s background and his own are striking, using artistic expression as a justification for how he’s living his life and as a defense against accusations of selfishness follows pretty directly from there.  Mix in some input by the two main actors (who began dating during and eventually married after the production) and it’s pretty clear that the interest of the filmmakers was not on the spooky stuff.

Which is why the decision to structure the entire last half hour of the movie around an exorcism slash séance kind of ruins the entire thing.  At around the hour mark we’re introduced to Kim Hunter’s character, Adriana Putnam.  Her name is mentioned around forty minutes in by someone, she’s established as a witch, and once Sal has deteriorated to the point where he’s chasing vague figures into the woods he finally agrees to go see her.  She’s introduced licking the forehead of a toddler for esoteric spooky reasons, which is certainly a choice.  Hunter plays her as very grounded and sincere, which stands in stark contrast to the nonsense she immediately starts spouting.  According to her not only are there five forces in nature, earth, water, air, fire, and a lifeforce, they come together to form seven different levels, the first of which is the lower astral plane, and in that plane someone who knows how can let loose the forces of evil.  These forces can upset the balance and have to be balanced out.  I only spend time detailing this because the movie certainly does, and to no clear end.  A shockingly high amount of these last thirty minutes is spent on Hunter getting into the weeds on things that don’t really matter.  The actual ceremony itself is a solid eleven minutes long before it’s interrupted with a shotgun blast to Kim Hunter’s back.

Then there’s the ending, which not only doesn’t wrap up the matter of the demon or the curse but also doesn’t really address what the rest of the movie is about: Sal’s midlife crisis.  Intermittently during the movie we’ve seen Sal and Jackie interact with their dog.  It’s whined at the robed figure tormenting Sal a couple of times, Jackie fed it some leftovers, it’s been in the background of some scenes, but it’s never been given any particular emphasis.  What has been more emphasized is Sal’s ownership of a rifle, which he will occasionally have in hand during insert shots of him pacing around the cabin, shirtless.  After the séance, after the psychic has been shot and the grandfather has apparently been either killed or just taken by the robed figure he summoned, it’s left very unclear, Sal is coming home from … somewhere and again sees the robed figure watching him from the woods.  He takes his dog and gun and goes out into the forest after it. 

Because we’re outside and the camera is moving it once again becomes very hard to understand what’s going on.  Best I can tell the dog begins to follow something of a trail, begins to whine in the same way it’s been whining before upon spotting the robed figure, Sal looks around but can’t see anything, sees a very unclear set of markings in the mud that seem very artificial but don’t mean anything obvious no matter how long the camera shot lingers on it, and then the dog begins to growl and bark and attacks Sal.  After a rolling series of edits that convey the general sense that the dog wasn’t really trained to attack for the camera Sal is forced to shoot his dog.  The final moments of the movie are the dog dying, Sal falling to his knees beside it, him placing a comforting hand on it as it dies, then a still frame of his sad face as the credits roll.  And that’s it.

The sign of evil, I guess?

If you wanted to be generous you could say that the ambiguity of the ending is appropriate as the movie doesn’t seem to want to answer any of the questions it’s been raising.  If the real heart of the movie is Sal’s guilt over his own selfishness, then the actual threat wasn’t the demon set upon him by the grandfather but the internal self-doubt that’s causing his stress and panic attacks.  The dog is another part of his life that’s turning on him and in having to put it down it’s another consequence of how he’s chosen to live.  As an alternative I would lean much more towards the interpretation that the filmmakers didn’t have any idea how to wrap anything up and simply ended with a half-hearted shrug.  At the end of the film Sal is still miserable, his dog is now dead, the little girl he killed is still dead, and about the only positive development is that the old man isn’t going to be glaring at him from across the street anymore.

This isn’t a terrible movie but it also isn’t a very successful one.  The direction was interesting, the acting was good, the story was barely existent, and the ending was deeply unsatisfying.  Being unsatisfying on purpose is still unsatisfying.  While its premise is that of a horror movie it never even attempts to really be one.  Everything about the curse could have been excised and you’d basically have the same movie.  You wouldn’t have the exorcism or the psychic being shot, but considering the movie ends almost directly after that scene while never showing any kind of consequences it doesn’t seem like that big a loss.  This is a movie about a guy about to hit forty and feeling guilty about his choices in life and then the movie ends without ever giving him any kind of breakthrough or catharsis.  It simply establishes that he’s in a bad place, shows how it’s bad, then ends with him still in that place with no self-examination having taken place at any point.  It’s possible that the director made this movie to work out those emotions and by the end of production was still ambivalent and without answers.  That doesn’t help me as a viewer.  Martin Goldman wouldn’t direct another movie until 1997’s ‘Legend of the Spirit Dog,’ which is a family film about a magical Native American spirit dog that I’m sure has held up just fine, which is a shame as in this he displays some natural aptitude and a surprising amount of authorial intent.  It’s a fairly raw portrayal of what 1976 must have felt like and for me at least that’s likely more interesting than any tension these filmmakers could have wrung out of such a standard premise.