Second to torture porn, exorcism movies may the worst type of horror film.  Every one of them adheres, to varying degrees, to a boilerplate. Unavoidably, they always have the big exorcism as the final third.  And yet, I must find this genre a guilty pleasure because it seems I have seen every one of the stupid things.  Sadly, however, unless the title of the movie is The Exorcist (sans trailing roman numerals), your exorcism movie is going to be garbage.

Such is the case of The Rite, and it is glorious garbage.  Strange but, given the genre, it wouldn’t really be giving away anything if I told you everything that happens in this film.  The Rite has to follow the usual template and it does, but with some of its own special flourishes.  Oh, and it’s PG-13, so you know it’s going to be extra awful.

This is the perfect movie for you whether you find a red-eyed demon-possessed mule hilarious or terrifying.  This is also the perfect movie for you if you like Anthony Hopkins in full scenery-devouring mode.  Weird how, after Silence Of The Lambs, Hopkins would continue to take good roles while working in things like this could only have been for a paycheck.  Perhaps the best (read: worst) line he has in this picture is when he spits out, “WOW!  COOL!  WHATEVER!  DUDE!”.  How this isn’t a meme yet, I don’t know.

There’s only one more thing I am going to say about The Rite that I hope will convey how preposterous and self-important it is: in the end credits, the “t” in “cast” is a cross. 

I pity those who can’t find anything to enjoy in such a pathetic movie as this, almost as much as I pity anybody who would actually be scared by it.

Dir: Mikael Håfström

Starring Anthony Hopkins and some people I don’t remember off the top of my head and are too lazy to look up, and yet I probably could have done so in the time it took me to write this long, stupid sentence.

Watched on blu-ray.