El exorcismo de mi mejor amiga

"My Best Friend's Exorcism" is a light horror-comedy film, based on the novel of the same name, but when it is adapted to a screenplay, it does not achieve the expected charm. The film starts well by showing us conventional teenagers with their typical age problems but in the course of its duration everything becomes ridiculous, the comic dialogues go from funny to repetitive and unfunny, the horror elements also have a good start until they disappear. The actors do their job, the costume and hair design are good, they transport you to the eighties, but the digital effects are terrible as if they came from a cheap television movie of the '00s. The end result is a film that catches and then turns stupid with the occasional salvageable scene.

I remember finishing the book in a day. It was an original, well-paced and fun read that I just could not put down until every page was turned. Sometimes that does not always translate to the screen, but I still found the film to be quite entertaining. The book had some pretty heavy, dark scenes and I was surprised that the movie did as well. I figured it would be presented more as a comedy than a horror film, playing more to mainstream viewers. However, there were some genuinely creepy aspects to the mostly dramatic script. It's such an original concept that it may be too unusual for those who haven't read the novel.

Overall: My Best Friend's Exorcism is lightweight and fun, with a few great moments, but it felt a little bland during some sections. It was worth watching, but it's pretty average.

I wanted to like this a lot more than I do because they got some stuff *so* right, but overall it felt pretty lackluster for most of the film. I think it's a solid 5.5/10 and if they had made some of it a little less generic it could have easily hit a 7 with the things they did right.

The good: They have a couple of awesome scenes/effects that got me. They've got some good jokes. They have a fun tertiary character, but unfortunately don't use him enough. The production quality is great, all the actors seemed ok, and the overall tone is quite fun.

The not-so good: They spend a lot of time slowly panning through bland scenes and not adding to the film. They don't have quite enough characterization outside of "these girls are quirky friends", "these girls are shallow bullies", and "these jocks are soooo mean". They didn't lean in enough with the side characters and some of the more interesting bits, and spent a lot of time on cookie-cutter stuff that wasn't memorable.

A great premise and a good book. Could have been Booksmart meets The Exorcist. But Elsie Fisher is awful as Abigail which torpedos most of the film's promise and none of the cast are helped by a very lazy and poorly crafted script. The whole films feel very rushed, there's no connection to the main characters as most of the back story and bonding has been ditched I'm favour of getting to the horror elements faster. Which leads to the final strike against this film, in that it's about as scary as an episode of Scooby Doo. Constantly shifting in time between young teen/family friendly and adult. It just never really knows what it's doing. Amiah Miller does however deliver a good performance despite the bad material and myopic direction she's been given.

I was hoping that the first film adaptation of a Grady Hendrix work would be awesome, in spite of the bad reviews. But this veers so wildly from the source material that it might as well have changed the title and inserted an "inspired by" credit.

The whole point of the novel was that it was Abby and Gretchen together against the world until all of this started. Giving them more outside connections dilutes that, and the filmmakers did nothing to help reestablish that connection while also adding new characters.

I'm disappointed. I hope that the failure of this won't prevent other Hendrix novels from being adapted; hopefully, by better hands.