The Asylum. Just saying the words is enough to send chills up the spine & bile up the esophagus. For years, the so-called filmmakers at this trash factory have been doing little more than churning out some of the worst movies in anyone's memories. From their so-bad- they're-completely awful SyFy originals like 'Mega Piranha vs. Who Gives a Damn' to their appalling 'mockbusters' like 'Transmorphers,' The Asylum has been able to set a new bar for just how low one can go in the film industry. And, yet, no matter how deep they dig into the septic systems of their imaginations, somehow these scam artists manage to just keep on going. This time, their target is the exorcist subgenre, especially the recent success 'The Last Exorcism.'
With 'Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes,' director Jude Gerard Prest (which is more likely than not a pseudonym since no one would want to put their real name to a film like this) and his team of misfits flat out lie, telling the world (well, the small damned percentage of the world that is unfortunate to witness this disaster) that what this film is actually real. Yeah, real garbage. From almost the first frame, 'Anneliese' tries to be simply a compilation of what made other exorcist movies work, but they just assemble their own moronic versions of those elements. Even the opening cloned, almost completely, a scene from William Friedkin's 'The Exorcist.' I suppose the writers thought this could pass because of their claim that the 'Anneliese' videos inspired Friedkin's movie. . . even though 'The Exorcist' was inspired by the book by William Peter Blatty. . . which was inspired by an entirely different exorcism of a boy. 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose' is the film that was actually based (however loosely) on the events of the Anneliese Michel incident.
Friedkin's groundbreaking horror masterpiecce isn't the only film "borrowed from" for this production. We also revisit some exciting (eh. . .) scenes from 'The Last Exorcism,' 'Paranormal Activity' (which was already mockbusted by The Asylum with 'Paranormal Entity'), and a few others. Strangely enough, the film even stretches to copy itself by randomly flashing back to its own scenes only moments after those scenes happen, almost as if the crew was so proud of their work that they just had show it twice. . . but, that can't be true, so they were probably bloating the film to hit a reasonable runtime since they didn't have the brains to actually flesh out a full script.
Visually, the film is just a mess. To bring realism (maybe?) to the otherwise ridiculous creation, three different cameras are used throughout. . . or just the same camera with three different filters: black & white, sepia, & super 8 grainy. Add this to the eye-raping cinematography and 'Anneliese' is about as enjoyable to look at Alex DeLarge's forced theatre trip in 'A Clockwork Orange.' Luckily, most viewers will probably spend more time watching the clock waiting for the movie to end thanks to the excruciatingly grueling pace of the writer's amateurish script, which was probably the only thing worse about this movie than the directing, editing, and cinematography.
Final Verdict: 1/10.
-AP3-
