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Exorcism
[Deimos]
1974; color
Directed by Juan Bosch
Starring: Paul Naschy, Grace Mills, Maria Perschy & Maria Kosti
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Paul Naschy claims he wrote the script for "Excorcismo" (dubbed Exorcism for this release; although there's something about adding that O at the end that makes the title seem cooler - or at least more endearingly Eurotrashy) two years before The Exorcist hit the big screen. Of course, most people think that's a load of crap, because the film was released amid a ton of Exorcist rip-offs that dominated the horror circuit in a number of countries for a few years after the original hit theaters; but I'm ready to give Naschy the benefit of the doubt for what may have been an original idea. Granted, there are a number of elements in the final reel that either directly or indirectly do rip off Freidkin's tour de force on possession, but much of the first two-thirds of the movie bears little or no resemblance to it's supposed inspiration in the eyes of many. I'm not gonna go into an A-B comparison of one and the other but, from the very beginning, even the initial premise of the roots of the possession are wholly original. Things starts off with a bunch of hippie / pagan / pseudo-Satanists partying on the beach, having a little fun and a little innocent bloodletting (note: NOT a sacrifice) in front of an unnamed horned statue / idol. In the next scene, two of the beachgoers (a couple) are driving around some winding roads at high speed when, suddenly, the girl loses control of the car and it plunges off a cliff. Miraculously, both are thrown from the wreckage and emerge relatively uninjured. Except that the girl inexplicably says something like "I saw the face of death," and then tries to strangle her boyfriend. Later, at the hospital, her physical recovery appears to be moving along nicely until she begins to display more and more odd behavior towards all who are close to her. The weirdness continues once she's on her home turf and, coincidentally enough, people start turning up dead with their heads spun around backwards. Eventually her kin calls on their priest, played to the hilt by Naschy, who also happens to be an old friend of the family. After much back and forth with the girl (and everyone else), he susses out that the girl is indeed possessed—actually, a few other people hint at that to him earlier, but he tries to dissuade their line of thinking—so he sets about performing an exorcism. What's really divergent from the American film (and the William Peter Blatty novel, for that matter) is that the girl is not possessed by a demon but by the spirit of her own dead father, and he's back to avenge being locked in an asylum for years. The final frames leave the viewer wondering if the exorcism worked or not (another patented Eurotrash/grindhouse ending), but it doesn't really matter because the movie is pretty damn entertaining.
—the Kommandant
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