From Filmax and producer Julio Fernandes comes a Spanish-made, British-set addition to the minor craze for exorcism movies, initially prompted by the effective THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE and boosted last year by THE LAST EXORCISM, the awesome [REC] 2 and THE RITE. This one, despite striving to add a voyeuristic sense of realism with the use of handheld cameras, forgoes the slow-burn authenticity of both EMILY ROSE and the Daniel Stamm movie in favor of elaborate bugs-in-the-toilet shock effects within the first half hour.

   Sophie Vavasseur is unsympathetic as the home-schooled 15 year old daughter of a Catholic middle class family whose behaviour-shifts (self harming, moodiness, dabbling with Ouija boards) seem fairly traditional elements of adolescent rebellion until she starts having sudden, violent fits and talking like she’s been attending The Mercedes McCambridge School of Dramatic Arts. She’s sent to a shrink, who promptly drops dead and the Friedkin influence is notably found within the vivid depictions of mundane medical horrors in the early going : injections, harrowing MRI scans, etc. The one hope, the only hope is Max Von - er, Stephen Billington as Vavasseur’s uncle, a priest suspended after an earlier, botched exorcism. The girl’s parents insist it’s all in their head but spontaneous levitations would seem to suggest otherwise.

   Like the recent THE RITE, the movie all too quickly abandons any potential ambiguity about what is really happening to its protagonist by hurling clear signs of possession at the audience for the sake of cheap shocks. It’s overwrought in terms of content and music almost from the get go, and several of the performances are alarmingly phony : kudos to the Mum figure who delivers the line “This is all absurd! There must be a non-theological reason!” that defines her character.

   The corruption of this sullen, unappealing emo brat turns out, inevitably, to be far less shocking, emotionally involving and interesting than the fate of Linda Blair four decades earlier. It’s worth noting that THE LAST EXORCISM and EMILY ROSE were both rather effective at offering alternative, convincing slants on a theme already given as definitive a cinematic interpretation as can be imagined. Poor characterization and mediocre acting doom this one from getting under the audience’s skin in the same fashion.

   At worst, the movie is in-your-face manipulative : a slo-mo melodramatic Child Death Scene cynically thrown in to bump up the death count actually makes you reconsider Mary Lambert’s handling of Gage Creed’s demise in PET SEMATARY as more subtle than you always thought. What’s more, EXORCISMUS really falls apart in the final reels, when it turns awkwardly into a story of an obsessed, threatening priest and, if subtlety really has left town, fails to deliver the fireworks it has seemingly built up to. Doug Bradley’s cameo is so fleeting that it almost seems they caught him on the fly.