I really wish I liked this more. As a huge fan of Grady Hendrix’s original book, I was looking forward to My Best Friend’s Exorcism, but the film, directed by Damon Thomas, really struggles to nail the tone of the novel or find its own voice.
The closing credits – an 80s freeze frame montage featuring a ‘where are they now’ of the main characters – clearly hints at the tongue-in-cheek meta-strand that should have been a constant throughout, not just a late-game addition, mostly brought on when lead character Abby (Elsie Fisher) employs the help of body-building exorcist, Christian Lemon (Chris Lowell). Prior to this point, the film ambles from one recycled plot device to another – cycling through a number of high school ‘dramas’ as possessed teenager Gretchen (Amiah Miller) manipulates and exploits her friends and fellow students. Set at a religious school, MBFE attempts to incorporate some topical commentary regarding dated religious doctrine, as well as the dismissal or outright silencing of young girls who find themselves the victims of trauma and assault, but these threads are mostly left dangling and lacking the pointedness and detail that such topics deserve.
Overall, MBFE really should have indulged in the gross-out qualities of the book and not smoothed out the edges of what is, at its core, a riff on 80s body horror films and their cliches; a missed opportunity that had the potential to follow the lead of other recent gratuitous horror-comedies drenched in cheesy 80s nostalgia, be it Psycho Goreman or Vicious Fun, but missed it by a country mile.
Notes from the Multiplex 