Y’know, calling a movie The Pope’s Exorcist seems unfair to the demon. It’s doubling down on the holy…. but that assumes the demon is Catholic… maybe the demon is Presbyterian or Mormon or Seventh Day Adventist? All I know for sure though is that Hollywood has a real thing for Catholic priests… I hope they’re right. Maybe that’s why we don’t see possessed people out walking their dog… an gaggle of Catholic priests are out there exorcizing ’em faster than the devil can possess ’em.

What was my point? Oh, yeah…. The Pope Exorcists is about an exorcist who – get this – waves his crucifix at a possessed child and says all the things. You know… all the things. Every one of them. It’s a checklist of clichés with a veritable countdown timer to the requisite contortionist demon. You want a possessed kid with a crusty voice tied to a bed? They got you covered. You want a slurry of four letter words out of the kid’s mouth? Check. You want creepy words written on the victim’s stomach? Gotcha there. You want the suggestion of incest between the demon and the kid’s mother? You got it, you sicko.

There are so many similarities to The Exorcist that I briefly thought this flick might be a faster-paced remake. But, no, they mix in enough clichés from a dozen other movies and then seed in a couple semi-original ideas… and here I was, not at all expecting the Spanish Inquisition.

The writing for the demon is pretty lame and we care nothing for the kid who is possessed. Russell Crowe is the priest doing all the heavy lifting and he’s having fun. I’m not sure if his casual jokes are in the script or if he’s just ad-libbing because he’s in the 200th exorcism movie… but at least one of us was having a good time.

The film does manage to perk up a tiny bit in the final act. It’s not amazing, but it gets pretty crazy and that’s more than I was expecting after the first twenty dreary, repetitive, cliché-ridden minutes.

I’d be surprised if anyone who had seen a movie like this before was ever actually scared… I was mostly bored and then I’d perk up for a few minutes here and there. I’ve seen worse… it wasn’t terrible… I guess. But it sure doesn’t make a good argument for why it exists.

Score: 71