The Last Exorcism just like all the rest

Piggybacking on the home-video cinematography of 2007's successful "Paranormal Activity," and 1999's "Blair Witch Project," Daniel Stamm's "The Last Exorcism" brings you into the strange depths of Louisiana, where the religion of Voodoo, cults and mysticism bicker and mesh with one another.  

The film is set up like a documentary, and follows the fraudulent preacher and exorcist Cotton Marcus (played by Patrick Fabian), who professes to have somewhere along the line lost his belief in spirits, demons and the supernatural.  

He continues, however, performing his sermons and "exorcisms" because it's all he's ever known.

He feels that if they make other people believe things are somehow being put right, then he's probably doing God's work. Plus, it's easy money.  

Pastoral sermons are, to him, nothing but crowd psych-ups intermixed with card tricks and sensationalism, and his exorcisms are similarly rigged so that hidden speakers emit looped "demonic" sounds, and transparent strings attached to room items are subtly pulled to simulate supernatural disturbance.  

The film utilizes the soon-to-be-absolutely-cliché afflicted person persona where the character with the problem stares uncomprehendingly, without response at the ones talking to her, which here builds up just about as much tension as it does in every other PG-13 horror flick.  

The movie, however, does do a good job at holding your attention.

Initially, you are somewhat taken in by Reverend Marcus' skepticism (at least in the context of the film), but the various encounters on the Sweetzer farm reveal that something dark and sinister really is happening, even if it involves human treachery just as much as demonic possession.  It becomes  clear that nothing could have prepared him for what was to come.

The last 15 minutes of the film take it in a completely different direction, tying loose ends in an intensely dramatic and unexpected way, and will leave many moviegoers wishing things had wrapped up more predictably.  It's not a bad film by any means — the cast performances are good (though I wouldn't say any are especially noteworthy) and the plot is effective, but of course, exorcism movies have been done before, so the movie doesn't offer much in the way of a new experience.  

It's fair, but it's not great.

Most won't be completely disappointed, but they probably won't want to see it again either.

To date, the movie has earned an estimated $21.3 million at the box office.