THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE
I'm not sure what the inspiration was behind doing another movie about the exorcism of a young girl. Sure, it was 'based on a true story' and so on, but THE EXORCIST already did pretty much everything you could want from that kind of tale.
The main reason I went to see it was a few scenes from the trailer which looked nice and spooky: the girl walking down the street and seeing people's faces seem to "bleed" black and become misshapen ghostly figures. I liked that, it was something that would scare me and I couldn't remember seeing anything like that in movies before.
Unfortunately, aside from a few viscerally creepy images, the movie was pretty forgettable to me. They made some odd choices with the story--it's based on a trial of the priest who performed the failed exorcism of this 19-year-old girl, who died soon after. As a result the actual title character of Emily Rose has no personality at all, you basically never see her when she's not frothing at the mouth, contorting into painful-looking shapes, or shouting obscenities in various archaic languages. There's no sense of empathy with her because you never get to know her at all.
The actual main character is the lawyer who takes the priest's case, a hotshot attorney who has just gotten a murderer off the hook with her amazing lawyering skills. The prosecution makes the case for the girl's medical condition, and the defense attempts to make the case for possession. The courtroom antics aren't very interesting and the ending makes absolutely no sense to me--I don't know much about courtroom procedure but they should have explained what happened a bit more.
I'd recommend even dedicated horror fans to give this a miss, it's a lackluster courtroom drama pretending to be supernatural horror, and not really succeeding at either.
Jeff
The main reason I went to see it was a few scenes from the trailer which looked nice and spooky: the girl walking down the street and seeing people's faces seem to "bleed" black and become misshapen ghostly figures. I liked that, it was something that would scare me and I couldn't remember seeing anything like that in movies before.
Unfortunately, aside from a few viscerally creepy images, the movie was pretty forgettable to me. They made some odd choices with the story--it's based on a trial of the priest who performed the failed exorcism of this 19-year-old girl, who died soon after. As a result the actual title character of Emily Rose has no personality at all, you basically never see her when she's not frothing at the mouth, contorting into painful-looking shapes, or shouting obscenities in various archaic languages. There's no sense of empathy with her because you never get to know her at all.
The actual main character is the lawyer who takes the priest's case, a hotshot attorney who has just gotten a murderer off the hook with her amazing lawyering skills. The prosecution makes the case for the girl's medical condition, and the defense attempts to make the case for possession. The courtroom antics aren't very interesting and the ending makes absolutely no sense to me--I don't know much about courtroom procedure but they should have explained what happened a bit more.
I'd recommend even dedicated horror fans to give this a miss, it's a lackluster courtroom drama pretending to be supernatural horror, and not really succeeding at either.
Jeff
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