Real exorcisms are nothing like in the movies

I've seen video of "real" exorcisms. They weren't very interesting. You had a girl speaking in a funny voice. She throws up in a bag. People stand around yelling religious stuff at her. A nondenominational minister pressed a crucifix into her at one point and she breaks character.

"That hurts!" she says in a normal voice.

"Oh. Sorry."

Then they start in again.

In fact, there was a long article on a skeptic website about the case that the book (and movie) The Exorcist was based on. In the late 1940s, a 14-year-old boy in Maryland was supposedly possessed. There was a wildly inaccurate documentary on the Discovery channel about it. The author of the article actually found the kid, now an old timer who wanted to be left alone. He also interviewed the last surviving priest who was involved and a couple of the kid's friends.

According to the boy's friends, he wasn't possessed; he was a jerk. He had a mean dog. His idea of a joke was to invite his friends over and then sic the dog on them when they came to the door.

The priest's account of it was that the priests were completely credulous. They took everything at face value. There were scratches on the kid's stomach which they assumed were the work of the devil. Did they watch the kid to make sure he wasn't doing it himself? No. Did they look for skin under his fingernails? No.

The priest said that the kid spoke Latin, a language he didn't know, but that he was just mimicking the priests to annoy them.

It was the mother and the grandmother in the family who were getting him exorcised. The kid's father came home from work and read the paper and wanted no part of it. And by all accounts, the priests weren't frightened by anything that happened. One of them was laughing about it during the exorcism.

But everything was in there. The kid's bed did shake, but his friends explained that beds back then were light frames on wheels with thin mattresses and it was very difficult to keep them from moving a couple of feet every time you turned over. The scratches appeared on his stomach, he spoke Latin, as I said. He was able to spit very accurately, but his friends explained that they practiced a lot.

I bring this up now because I saw that a movie called The Last Exorcism is on a list of the ten worst movies of 2010.

Here's the list:

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/135164-the-10-worst-films-of-2010/

I don't know. Splice sounds sort of interesting.

Personal film-making

There was a book at the university library, published in the early '70s, called Personal Filmmaking. It was written, if I remember correctly, by a community college instructor. He taught a class on the subject.

His students would get their hands on an 8mm movie camera, easy enough to do back then. You had to ask around if you didn't own one. I don't know if they showed up as often in the Goodwill stores as they did a few years later. All it cost was a few bucks for a roll of film.

Basically, they'd make little movies. Some did art films. One example was something where a guy had his friends act out a funeral. Another was about two hunters. As they drive into the countryside, they hear a report on the radio that a killer had escaped from the state hospital and was on the loose.

Say what you will, they sound more interesting than most student films.

I don't know if home video has ruined this sort of thing. The movies they did had the advantage of being silent or with unsynchronized sound.

I wish people would do stuff like that with their Flip cameras.

But then, I used to buy home movies whenever I came across them in junk stores. I had one wedding movie (4 minutes, regular 8), a Super 8 movie of a homely baby's first birthday. They set up the camera, put an ornate birthday cake in front of the baby and encouraged her to dig her hands into it and tear it up. I had some 16mm films of a family drinking and riding around on minibikes with guns. A teen, aware that he's being filmed, tries not to react to a groin injury while on his minibike.

There was an odd movie where a couple carried their tiny baby into the middle of a lake. Then they stand there with it. They walk back. In another scene, they put the baby in a wading pool, holding its head up and splashing water on it.

I only came across a couple of examples of people trying anything artistic. One was a a roll of black leader that had some stuff scratched into it.

Even back then, few people tried to create anything narrative.

One of the more interesting things I bought was a large set of slides. They were pictures of two elderly couples on vacation in Hawaii in the early 'seventies. We see some typical tourist stuff. We see the building where Steve McGarrett's office was in Hawaii Five-O. Then it all changes. After a certain point, all the pictures were of massive storm damage. Trees blown down. Lamp posts blown down. Cars smashed. Buildings damaged. They had an interesting trip.

Type casting, George Reeves, Mel Gibson

You know how they could have saved George Reeves' career?

He had starred as Superman on TV. But that ruined him. When he appeared in a movie around that time, members of the test audience saw him and started murmuring, "Superman! It's Superman!" His part was trimmed down to nothing.

Here's the way out of the typecasting. They should have put him in a movie where he'd go through the whole thing with his leg in a cast and he could constantly hurt himself. Maybe have him appear in a gun battle. When the other guy runs out of bullets, he could throw the gun at Reeves, hit him in the head and knock him down.

"OW! OWWWWW! My head! My head! Owwwwww!" Reeves could have said.

The audience would forget all about him having been Superman.

Other actors have done things sort of like that.

After playing Moses and Ben Hur, Charelton Heston played a swingin' architect in Earthquake and an equally swingin' pilot in Airport '75.

Steve McQueen's wife did most of the driving in The Getaway, and his character had very poor driving skills in The Hunter.

So here's what Mel Gibson should do. He should do a sequel to his old Australian movie, Tim. He had played a developmentally disabled 18-year-old gardener who marries his middle-aged employer. In the sequel, Tim could be a widower. Lonely and depressed, he innocently joins a neo-Nazi group, but soon realizes his mistake and quits in disgust.

Another thing about the cheap camcorders

A fifteen dollar camcorder is the perfect gift. It's cheap. No embarrassing gratitude from the recipient. Potentially fun to mess around with, but I don't think many people would waste fifteen dollars on one for themselves. I didn't. Just bought them as gifts.