My Best Friend's Exorcism

 Abby (Elsie Fisher) and Gretchen (Amiah Miller) are BFFs in the eighties. Gretchen gets possessed while visiting a haunted house, some melodrama and mildly comic scares ensue, and then there's an exorcism.

 And some other stuff happens. It's hard to muster enthusiasm to write about a movie like My Best Friend's Exorcism; It's not just that it's not for me, but mostly it's... basic. Very very basic.

 I'd heard good things about the book, and was planning to read it with my son but we never did get to it, and now we never will. To be fair there are some clever conceits here and there, a few funny lines I'm guessing are lifted straight from the novel; But the movie adaptation reeks of... not exactly low effort, but definitely of an utter lack of ambition.

 Visually it's got no energy whatsoever, built out of exactly the types of shots you'd expect for each scene, no surprises. The script is similarly dull- blunt in its messaging, tame in its horror and way too broad in its comedy. And it relies exclusively and unnecessarily on CGI for effects, which is never a good thin in a horror movie. Yes, even the prerequisite projectile vomiting is completely unconvincing.

CGI pea soup. Pazuzu does not approve.

 I didn't like any of the acting in this, but to be honest the characters are so undeveloped and the directing so flat that I wouldn't hold it against the actors. It's ostensibly a period piece, but it looks like a modern movie with 80's signifiers thrown in every now and then - including some that feel particularly forced.

 That the horror didn't work for me is ok - that's the part that's absolutely not for me: Heightened teen drama is not something I'd rank highly in the list of things I can be bothered to give a fuck about; The main scares are built around not the story's supernatural elements, but things like social insecurities, fear of betrayal and alienation, and stacking the cards against the protagonist to a ridiculous degree (an extremely common narrative device in YA fiction I can't stand.)

 At least some of the humor works - 'puke and rebuke' might be the best euphemism for an exorcism I've heard, and there's a couple of  solid visual gags and funny lines lurking in the script. It's not a lot, but it's something, I guess.

 I didn't hate this movie, exactly. But I was very impatient for it to be done and over with once it was clear it wouldn't have anything interesting on offer... which, unfortunately, was only a couple of scenes in.