The Possession Review
A weird combination of awesome and mundane.
Anyone else remember when Hollywood was a font of creativity with new and cool ideas coming out all the time? When original ideas were sought and lauded while producers and actors worked to create their own identity and not be like anything else?
Well, those days are long gone, and thank God! Who wants exciting new ideas when we can get our entertainment spoon fed to us from the moldering compost heap of old movies? We take the time to recycle our paper, plastic, and metal. Why not recycle ideas as a means of making money without having to strain the creative process? Surely our Mother Earth will thank us at some point.
Sigh. That was a little harsh. This movie is by no means bad, and in many ways is really, really good. However, it is pretty much the Exorcist with a little bit of the Devil Inside and any number of other possession themed movies. The plot is painfully predictable for anyone who has seen an exorcism movie and doesn’t even attempt to mix it up (unless changing the Catholic priest into a Jewish rabbi counts as a radical change). The predictability, combined with the modern PC enamored inability to take the horror to the actual level needed (remember Linda Blair violating herself with a holy cross? Nothing that horrible in here) makes the scenes in here that are supposed to terrify you seem more prosaic, like watching an exorcism documentary. There are a few jump out at you moments, but other than that I never found myself honestly that scared.
What this movie does have, however, is some of the best acting I have seen in any horror movie ever. 
The protagonist Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan-Watchmen (Comedian), the Losers, P.S. I Love You. Watchmen image courtesy of the Movie T Shirt category) plays the role like this is his Oscar nomination, and his interaction with his young possessed daughter (Natasha Calis-Impact, the Firm, Held Hostage) has real father/daughter chemistry. Natasha as Em does a job that most adults would envy, moving seamlessly from innocent vegetarian idealist to possessed Hell-spawn. The other daughter (Madison Davenport-Horton Hears a Who, Over the Hedge) is also amazing in her support role. The estranged wife (Kira Sedgwick-Phenomenon, Closer, Gamer) and her d-bag boyfriend (Grant Show-Melrose Place, Natalie Holloway, Ice) both nail the roles down hard. I think it fair to say I have seen a lot of movies in the last couple years filled with both good and bad acting and this one really amazed me.
Sam Raime is involved in this movie in some ill defined way. I have something of a love/hate relationship with Raime, similar in nature (if not in magnitude) to my relationship with George Lucas. I love Sam for Evil Dead I and II, Army of Darkness, Bubba Hotep, and Drag Me to Hell but he did his credibility a huge disservice with his last Spider-man movie. A lifetime of great movie accomplishments ruined by emo Peter Parker and Green Goblin on a snowboard.
Before I get into the meat of this film I would like to raise one thing this movie had going on that bugged the hell out of me. Like most horror movies this one capitalized on dark lighting effects to enhance the terror. However, the trick the director came up with to create the dark lighting was to literally get the actors to forget how to turn on a light switch. If any normal human walks into a dark morgue filled with corpses the first thing they are going to do is feel around the side of the door looking for the lights, not try to use their cell phone to see what is going on. This happened over and over again, all in rooms that nominally have great lighting. Hospitals, schools, modern houses; the list of scenes where the actor should have reached out all of 18 inches to actually see what the hell was going on is brutally extensive. I know this is a minor thing but I noticed it early on and ever time it happened after that it just bugged me more.
Anyway, the story. If there is one lesson to be gleaned from this movie it’s to NOT buy any occult looking garbage at a garage sale. Clyde and his wife are getting a divorce and their two daughters are dealing with it. Clyde buys Em a wooden box that contains an evil demon who possesses her. Now go rent the Exorcist and you have the entire story.
I’m not kidding. Em doesn’t spend as much time in bed, spinning her head, or bazooka barfing all over the place but essentially goes through the same progressively evil transformation and redemption. Instead of a Catholic priest Clyde finds a young Jewish rabbi (Matisyahu-Knocked Up, the Other Men in Black, Matisyahu) to perform the ceremony. There is a lot more chasing, and the box plays a big part of it, but that’s essentially it.
The stars. Phenomenal acting. I would see any of the actors in this film in almost anything else they do (all right, as a reviewer I would probably see it anyway, but at least I won’t be dreading it so much). Three stars. Camera work and pacing were all of high quality, as well as really good lighting effects. One star. If you have never seen anything more terrifying than the Sound of Music and are unfamiliar with the story of the Exorcist this film will scare the pants off you and be seen as a pretty decent movie. One star. Total: Five stars.
The black holes. So cookie cutter derivative it might as well have been written by taking the script from the Exorcist and used the Find and Replace function in Microsoft Word a half dozen times. Two black holes. The whole missing light switch thing, which even now is chaffing me like a pricker bush thong. One black hole. That’s pretty much it. Three black holes total.
A final score of two stars. That score isn’t really representative of the actual film quality. It’s not that bad really, and if you are either a super fan of the Exorcist or have never seen it you will probably enjoy the hell out of it. This movie frustrates me, in that had they used all that amazing acting and character development in a script even slightly more original they could have had an all time classic. Instead they have another remake that doesn’t even have the balls to call itself a remake. Come to think of it I think I would have enjoyed this a lot more had it just been the Exorcist 2012 with this cast of people. Date movie? Not really. Gruesome enough to put a girl off while not honestly terrifying enough to have her in your lap. Lawless is a better date film IMO. Bathroom break? That’s a good question. I was enjoying all the acting so much that I can’t think of anything worth missing. I guess I would say the scene between Em and Brett (the ex wife’s boyfriend) in the garage. You get the point (she’s evil) in the first three seconds and the rest of it doesn’t add anything.
Thanks for reading. I don’t have any movie plans this weekend but am sure I will come up with something. Watching lots of Star Trek right now. Feel free to comment on this review or movie here. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu, and if you have an off topic question or suggestion feel free to email me at [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Amazing Dave
