Scary back then, but not now

Rating: 6/10 (22 April 2018)

This is an infamous film that's left a legacy of being imitated and proclaimed at one point and still by many as the scariest movie ever made. But not only is this movie not scary, it's boring and unintentionally hilarious. I know that people in the 70's had never seen anything like this before so I can somewhat understand why they'd enjoy this, but I've seen a lot of things and this movie tried its best to engage me and it never did. The first biggest problem is that it's a watershed film (a movie that's been imitated and copied), but unlike other similar films like Die Hard and Halloween that to this day yeah have elements that are familiar, still have enough creativity and enjoyment throughout to make them solid. This however poorly executes its "creepy" visuals, almost every time Reagan does something that's suppose to be disturbing, we never get time to let it sink in, instead as soon as something happens it cuts away to a scene where something completely separated is happening, it's like cutting away in the middle of an action sequence and than seeing the aftermath later, stupid. So the ideas don't hold up from being copied and not well executed, to the point where the demon came off more like a 12 year old kid yelling online about video games or something, just ridiculous. Now the extra salt on the wound is the fact that the second problem is its length, this 2 hour movie has one scene after another that just drags on for so long with characters taking forever to get to the dang point already, so the movie wastes your time through its majority runtime and the parts where a little time should be spent to really get involved in the scenes, they cut away from it immediately. And you can say it's well made and well acted or whatever but that only goes so far, I'm not ever angry at people who definitely put time and effort into the things that they make. And yeah the effects are still great but none of it matters when the movie did such a poor job at having me care about anyone, the detective didn't need to be in the movie, the mom didn't need to be in the movie (heck if Reagan was an orphan it really wouldn't have made much of a difference overall since the mom didn't do much other than worry), the one priests mother didn't need to be there. Scene after scene of them trying to figure out with what's wrong with her, when we as the audience already know, this isn't a mystery story so why is it trying to be. She should've been almost fully possessed and getting worked on by the two priests by like 20-30 minutes in. Than have some maybe rivalry like tension between the priest with one doing things differently from the other, that would have been way more interesting and well executed. But no she instead gets possessed almost 3/4 of the way through, up until then you feel like the movie is just wasting your time, and when she is possessed (which by the way isn't a spoiler it's the premise of the movie) there's only about 10-15 minutes of it, and it's not scary in the slightest, none of it it's just hilarious because like I said she's acting like a spoiled kid throwing a temper tantrum. I'd say more but this is long at this point, it's terrible stay away.