The Disco Exorcist (2011) – Review

Suave (read: sleazy) swinging disco dude, Rex Romanski has a habit of picking up chicks at the local dance floor, shagging them senseless then moving on to the next ‘lucky’ lady. Unfortunately for Rex he tries this with Rita Marie, an evil black magic priestess. When he dumps Rita for a porn star she vows to wreak bloody revenge on him.

***

Right, in the spirit of making this a balanced review I’m going to focus on the good bits first. All two of them…

If you like excessive and faux exploitative nudity in your horror films (apparently there are some people who don’t) then you should enjoy at least that part of this movie. There’re enough boobs and backsides present to keep even the most avid Game of Thrones fan happy.

As the pick of a bad bunch the actor who played the lead character put in a decent performance as the womanising sex-addict. He threw himself into the action with gusto (the cynical part of me suggests that being surrounded by naked women telling him how good he was in bed wasn’t exactly his idea of a bad time anyway) and delivered his (godawful) lines with conviction.

So now onto the bad…

The film is described as a ‘horror comedy’ but I would suggest that it is neither of these, featuring as it did neither anything funny nor anything particularly horrible (apart from the writing/acting/penis-shots).  The one laugh came right at the start of the movie when the words ‘Disclaimer: The producers have no memory of the making of this picture’ appeared on screen. This gave me hope that maybe there would be some decent chuckles to be had, but sadly I was mistaken. The script just wasn’t well written enough to be anything but clunky and the characters were uhhhh less than well-rounded (except in the boob department).

There was, I suppose, a decent amount of gore splattered about the place but it was not nearly convincing enough to provoke anything other than eye-rolling in the viewer. If the movie had gone the whole hog and thrown itself into either horror or comedy it would have achieved much more than it did. Sitting unconvincingly between the two genres was never going to work here. Horror comedy is incredibly difficult to get right and this movie needed a far better script to make this work.

Apart from Mr Rex Romanski the acting was truly awful. If they were going for a pastiche on 70s exploitation films then they needed a lot subtler performers than this lot. They just made it look like bad acting, and not even ‘on purpose’ bad acting. Still, it seems harsh to blame the actors. When faced with lines like ‘I’ll rip out your tongue and shove it in my snatch’ even the most professional of thespians would struggle to sound convincing. I can see what they were going for, but for me, they didn’t quite get there.

So is this movie worth watching? I’d say if you are a fan of 70s style movies and have relatively low standards or a large amount of free time, yes. Otherwise I’d just watch Boogie Nights instead.