holy

It's been years, and I don't remember how many years, since I've gone to a theater and seen a crisply written, suspenseful, intelligent, suprising, chilling, and down right scary horror movie. And thanks to The Rite staring Anthony Hopkins, that streak is likely to continue into the foreseeable future. As I remember, I think I read it in a book somewhere, that "horror" movies should at least be some what chilling, sporadically scary, and not cause you to almost fall asleep during the climactic confrontation with a demon scene. Someone should have let the director in on this info. This movie was lacking in so many things but formost of it's defects was the forgettable cardboard uninspired performance by the leading actor. He was so unimpressive that I can't be bothered to look up his name to include here. And "gasp" Anthony Hopkins was terrible. But all things in this movie were made worse by a general lack of "creepiness". You would think that a movie about exorcists and exorcisms would have at least a little bit of creepiness. Wouldn't you? It would have been so easy to fix, a stray other worldly shadow here, a satanic flash image there. Instead we get the the obligatory "fake" scare: a cat jumping inexplicably at a window with the hero on the other side, some cute frogs, a mule with red eyes, and during the penultimate exorcism, demonic background voices that sounded as if they were done by the same guy who does the wisper voice overs for Busch Beer commercials. The overall effect left me drowsy. Oooh I almost forgot. The "What the fuck?!" scene came rather early on. Anthony Hopkins' character actually took a cell call during an exorcism he was performing. I should have taken it as a clue that the cosmos were screaming at me to leave, leave early so not to suffer through this piece of crap. I should have listened. When I finally walked out at the end, I sighed a phrase that immediately struck me as the perfect two word review for a such a poor film about a religious ritual: "Holy shit". Yeah, that about sums it up.