The Pope's Exorcist

 The Catholic Church has a problem with evil -- it has ceased to believe that it exists.  Perhaps, it's a matter of semantics:  the panel of priests interrogating the titular "Pope's exorcist", a jovial, burly cleric named Father Amorth, played by no less than Russell Crowe, seem to believe in paranoid schizophrenia and misguidedness but not the sort of evil that Old Nick sponsors in the world.  The priests question Amorth about an exorcism conducted somewhere in Italy; since the filmmakers suspect that most of the viewers won't want to read subtitles, the chairman of the ecclesiastical panel demands that Amorth respond to them in English, no doubt a relief to Russell Crowe whose Italian (and Latin), however, sounds competent and melodious.  Amorth has assisted a crazed kid by using the oldest trick in the book -- he taunts the demon into inhabiting a beautiful black pig and, then, has his colleague blast the beast with a shotgun the moment the demon gets inside the porker; exactly why this would work is unclear to me. (I live in Austin, Minnesota within a mile of a big packing plant where thousands of pigs perish daily and I was appalled to see the waste of good pork implied in this scene.)  It's not obvious why the priests are belaboring poor Amorth, but he basically gives them the finger and stalks out of the tribunal.  He has demons to battle.

Meanwhile down in Castile, an attractive young widow and her two kids install themselves in an obviously haunted abbey -- somehow they have inherited this scary place from the widow's deceased husband,  impaled through the forehead somehow in a gory crash that took place a year earlier.  They are planning to renovate the place, probably to turn it into some giant and ghastly B & B, but the resident devils aren't cooperating.  When the workers break through a hollow wall, they find a hidden passageway marked with the papal insignia.  Unfortunately, a huge ball of hell-fire erupts through the wall and toasts several workers.  The contractor, deterred by this calamity, decamps from the haunted abbey to leave the plucky widow and her two kids to deal with the spooks.  A powerful demon gets inside the little boy, withers him to skin and bones and taunts mom and sister in a guttural basso profundo voice.  Doctors in the nearby city can't figure out what's wrong with the kid -- their diagnostic manuals don't  include a billing code for demonic possession -- and so they release the family to return to their haunted mansion.  Things go from bad to worse when a local priest, Esquibel, comes to visit the kid -- he's named Henry -- and gets his ass kicked by the demon who shrieks at the Mom:  "You brought the wrong priest!"  This is obviously a job for the Pope's exorcist, Father Amorth.

What follows is a spectacle of cheesy CGI effects that get progressively bigger and more implausible with each scene.  The battle royale between the demon and the two priests includes projectile vomiting (blood), head-spinning, gory letters inscribed on people's bellies and rib cages, and the  infamous "spider walk" in which a character's limbs dislocate so that theulook like the legs of a coffee table and, then, the critter crawls up and down walls, shrieking imprecations.  While the family is suffering, shall I say, the "pangs of the damned", the two priests abandon them to explore a huge subterranean space seemingly hidden in the walls of the abbey.  Sniffing the air, Amorth says that it smells of "gas, sulphur, and little death."  Mummified exorcists are installed in the crypt.  At the Vatican, the Pope himself, played by the redoubtable Franco Nero, researches the case and discovers that all the records relating to the abbey have been mysteriously redacted -- a curious sight to see an illuminated manuscript filled with apparently random scribbles.  However, somehow Amorth figures out that in 1475, an exorcist was possessed himself by the demon Asmodeus and infiltrated the Catholic Church inspiring the Spanish Inquisition.  (Are we to believe that a similar thing happened at Vatican II with Belial seizing control of the Holy Roman Church and instituting a regime of child molestation?)  There's some more battling with demons and the Pope himself gets remotely infected by evil, also engaging in a spouting session of projectile vomiting.  There's not only a vast underground playground in which the demons can torment the heroes but also a haunted well that seems to drop straight down to hell.  Asmodeus knows the weakness of the priests:  Amorth is haunted war-time memories (he was partisan in Italy fighting the Fascists in WWII) and the devil exploits those memories by having the possessed kid vomit out a red bird that somehow figures in his PTSD -- this bird multiplies into a whole flock of devil-birds.  Various comely women that both priests have known appear naked and slathered in blood to tempt the protagonists.  (I think they would be more effective as seductresses without the gore cosmetics.)  In the end, the devil's win and the Catholic Church becomes the Synagogue of Satan and the world goes to Hell in a handbasket.  (I'm just kidding.)   With Asmodeus vanquished, Esquibel and Amorth set forth to slay the other 199 fallen angels lurking on Earth -- they give each other a 'high five" and set out for their inevitable sequel.  A closing title tells us that Amorth continued to fight demons until he died in 2015 and wrote many books advertising that "they are good books."  The Pope is pleased by this turn of events having survived his bout with demonic possession and, in the interest of racial equity, he installs Father Lumumba, a cool African bishop to serve as Amorth's supervisor.  The guy who didn't believe in evil seems to have suffered a fit of apoplexy and dropped dead on the cold floor of an ancient church.  Franco Nero will be familiar to audiences who watch spaghetti Westerns -- here in his old age, he appears as a poor man's Christopher Lee who was, in fact, a poor man's Alex Guinness.  Toward the end of the colossal battle between Amorth and Asmodeus, I expected the little kid to bellow:  "You fat fuck, you were overrated in Gladiator and now look at the depths to which you have sunk to act in this horrible piece of shit!"  I apologize for the obscenity.  But that's just the way demons speak. 

(The real Gabriele Amorth was an exorcist affiliated with the Vatican.  He was a partisan fighter, lawyer, and author with 30 books to his credit.  Born in 1925, he died in 2016.  In 2000, he claimed to have performed 50,000 exorcisms; by 2013, the number was asserted to be 130,000.  This begs the question as to when he had time to write his thirty books.  His bolstered the number of exorcisms, some commentators say, by claiming that certain poor devils had multiple demons in them and that he might expel a dozen evil spirits in one session.  He believed that demonic possession was common in the modern world due to Ouija boards, Yoga, and Freemasonry.  If you read the "talk" section on Amorth's wikipedia entry you will see that those who doubt the probity of the Good Father are claimed to be possessed by the Devil or, at least, doing the Devil's work themselves.)

Since writing this review, clumps of my hair have fallen out, blood blisters on my belly are calling me names, and my voice has dropped a full two octaves.