Film Review: Repossessed (1990)

Airplane! is one of the best parody films ever made, but the price of its success was paid by the audience having to endure multitude of insufferably bad films made imitating its formula. The two elements of such formula – saturation comedy structure and Leslie Nielsen as member of the cast – are present in Repossessed, 1990 comedy written and directed by Bob Logan.

The film represents the parody of 1973 horror classic The Exorcist. The protagonist, played by Nielsen, is Father Jebediah Mayii, a Catholic priest, and the plot begins with prologue set in 1973 when Mayii manages to exorcise Satan from the body of a teenage girl named Nancy. Seventeen years later Nancy Aglet (played by Linda Blair) is housewife who lives a happy life with husband Braydon (played by Thom Sharp) and two children. One evening, while watching television show by televangelist Ernest Weller (played by Ned Beatty), she gets possessed by Satan, who is determined to exact revenge on Father Mayii. After seeing the symptoms of her possession, another Catholic priest, Father Luke Brophy (played by Anthony Starke), concludes that the exorcism is warranted but he can’t perform it because he is young, inexperienced and lacking faith. In the meantime, Weller confers with representatives of Catholic Church and suggests that the exorcism should be performed on his widely televised show, inadvertently bringing Satan ability to possess countless other viewers. Mayii, who has weak heart, very reluctantly accepts Brophy’s pleas to return from retirement and face his old adversary once again.

Linda Blair, who played character of possessed teenager Reagan McNeill in The Exorcist, here, for all practical purposes, repeats the same role in Repossessed. According to Blair, she, unlike with the original film, enjoyed the experience at the set and opportunity to spoof the role which had, for better and worse, marked her career. Her words might seem true if we take into account that film productions that are fun to the cast and crew usually end up as anything but fun for the audience. And Repossessed is film that lacks fun indeed. Writer and director Bob Logan, unlike creators of Airplane! that took as their target 1970s disaster films while framing avalanche of gags into coherent plot, mainly takes inspiration from the most obvious and most memorable parts of The Exorcist - scenes of possessed teenager spinning heads, vomiting and talking dirty. He spoofs those scenes but all that jokes, many of them rather uninspired, are spent very early on. Logan is soon forced to take much broader scope of parody targets and, like many uninspired Hollywood parodies in last few decades, takes the easiest and most obvious among them. Problem is that many of those gags refer to the events, personalities and pop culture phenomena that could have meant a lot for American audience in late 1980s (Bush Senior’s presidency, Iran Contra scandal, televangelists’ scandals, MTV videos or pro wrestling) but they would mean nothing to the audience today. Needless to say, only a tiny fraction of those jokes could cause smile while the rest are boring. Not even scenes with few topless women that were somehow smuggled into film with PG-13 can maintain viewers’ interest. The attempt to end the film with series of rock’n’roll numbers is so bad that Repossessed justifiably earned Razzie for the Worst Original Song. But the worst disappointment is Leslie Nielsen, actor whose work in parodies was best when playing character with deadpan seriousness. Here he plays character which is deliberately clownish and his attempt to spoof Max von Sydow’s character of Father Merrin from The Exorcist is pathetic. Not even the very short running time of 80 minutes can rescue this film from ending as a complete waste of audience’s attention.

RATING: 2/10 (-)

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