The Pope's Exorcist [dir. Julius Avery]

After I saw the trailer for The Pope's Exorcist (TPE), I was expecting a campy knockoff of William Friedkin's influential possession shocker The Exorcist - In short, I wasn't in for the scares, I was in for the laughs. This turned out true in most aspects. Star Russel Crowe complements his stocky frame with a heavy Italian accent to play the titular clergyman Gabriele Amorth. The character is based on an actual person, himself a colorful character with such charming opinions as, “Practising yoga is Satanic, it leads to evil just like reading Harry Potter”. Amorth was chief exorcist of the Diocese of Rome, whose Bishop is the Pope himself. As per his own statements, Amorth performed tens of thousands of exorcisms, a claim that has been disputed. I'm thinking it might have been more interesting to see a biopic of the man himself (Friedkin, no less, covered an exorcism by Amorth in 2017, in a documentary called The Devil and Father Amorth, which received very tepid reviews). But TPE takes the same route as The Conjuring series did with Ed and Lorraine Warren, assuming Amorth's claims to be (ha!) gospel truth.

In a hilarious prologue, Amorth draws a demon inside a pig, whose head is then blown off with a shotgun. He is presented as a kind of papal James Bond, traveling across countries on missions (pun unintended): Of course, instead of an Ashton Matin our padre rides a swishy Lambretta and his choice of poison is a doppio espresso, stirred not shaken. Amorth is called in by M...erm, the Pope (Franco 'Django' Nero) to deal with a dangerous new case. This time it's an American family in which the widowed mother (Alex Essoe) with her kids travels to her husband's sole legacy, which is - you can't top this for absurdity - a disused Abbey in Spain.

The kids (Laurel Marsden and Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) are sulky smart-asses to start with, but things get worse when the young son starts to looks funny, talk in other voices and (naughty, naughty) cops a feel of mommy's boobs. Perfunctory visits to neurologists and counselors serve no purpose (they never do in these films). The local priest (Daniel Zovatto), after he is sent crashing out the boy's door, manages to hotline Rome, and Amorth rides in.

The rest of the film is a back and forth between Amorth and the demon (with Zovatto's priest taking the Jason Miller part from The Exorcist). It mixes the standard exorcism circus show with preposterous allusions to how the Spanish Inquisition (which in reality led to the death of thousands of people, and torture/incarceration of scores more) was basically the brainchild of a possessed priest, giving the church a clean chit. Still, the real Amorth professed that Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were the product of demonic possession, so this might be "true to source".

While not as much of a LOL-fest as I had hoped, TPE has sufficient hilariously absurd material to be a decent time-pass watch for a weekend movie night. Crowe seems aware of the camp quotient and his performance reflects the tongue-in-cheek. I did wish Franco Nero had also got in some of the action. Maybe Pope Django could have come in at the climax with a demon-slaying gatling gun quipping at the demon "Go back to Hell!"