[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Exeter (2015)

German director Marcus Nispel has had a short but mainly successful career as a film director. None of his films have been what you would call classics but i certainly enjoyed his 2003 remake / reimagining of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre whilst the likes of Pathfinder (2007) and Friday the 13th (2009) were watchable at worst.

Exeter however is poor, well not so much poor as inept. Inept yet a lotta fun. It tells the story of a group of college kids who decide to have a party in a long since abandoned, except by the church apparently not that you'd know it, psychiatric hospital for ' feeble minded children'. A building with a 'troubled' history that is supposedly haunted....

Fifteen minutes into the film the kids arrive at 'Exeter School of the Feeble Minded' and we're off. Nispel who also wrote this thing as well as directed it throws everything at the viewer with zero coherency.

Okay let's get drunk and do drugs - Check...Shit! This place is haunted, let's make a Ouija Board - Check... Woah! is that guy suddenly possessed? - Check. F*ck! Tie him up and perform an exorcism found via Google - Check. Arrgh! He's loose and attacking us - Check. Throw some Holy Water on him - Check.

Hang on where did we get some Holy Water? Oh yeah it was from that priest we ran over and stuffed in the car on the way here - Check.

F*ck me! The dead priest has now disappeared - Check. Oh it's okay we'll be saved by this bearded dude with his shotgun. - Check. Oops! He's blown his own head off as he attacked us - Check.

And so it goes. Seriously this was the first half of the film. Scenes crash landed on top of one another with ridiculous regularity but at least Nispel bothered to give reasons and explanations no matter how ludicrous they are.

The dialogue was mad to say the least. I laughed out loud several times. When one idiot comes up with a way to get rid of the dead shotgun dude -

"We'll dismember him, then take his guts out, mince everything into small pieces then put it all into jam jars and get rid of them across the city. Anyone got any questions?"

"Where we going to get the jam jars from?" Comes the reply from another idiot.

You really can't make this up, except Nispel clearly did. And for all it's hilarity and stupidity there are some great gory sequences whilst the asylum (The films name in the UK) was an effective setting. It felt like, come the end that this was a three hour film with all the shit taken out leaving set piece after set piece of chaos, comedy, more chaos and extreme violence.

The strange thing is i was never remotely bored. I can't say the same for yesterday's La Llarona (1933) a much more worthy film apparently. The entertainment factor is high although perhaps for all the wrong reasons and there's definite rewatch value involved probably because if you blink you will miss something.