It’s hard to believe in David Gordon Green, let alone any follow-up to William Friedkin’s traumatizing classic. Unlike horror franchises with a gratuitously marketable villain — like Halloween, Friday the 13th or C.H.U.D. — The Exorcist has to make do with a concept. And you can’t exactly trademark demonic possession, hence the wave of exorcism films that erode the legacy of the original. (Hell, just Google “the exorcism of” and you’ll stumble upon so many uninspired films, you’ll question why it took until 2021 for someone to finally produce The Exorcism of God.)

Even though The Exorcist influenced a heap of bargain-bin fillers, you also could argue it’s responsible for iconic flicks like Hereditary, The Evil Dead and Amityville Karen. It makes sense The Exorcist series persists. What doesn’t make sense, however, is putting Green at the helm of its revival — even more so after the director proved his recent Halloween trilogy should’ve ended before we endured two half-baked sequels. Unfortunately, The Exorcist: Believer doesn’t rid Green of whatever curse haunts him.

Thirteen years after his wife’s death, Victor (Leslie Odom Jr., Glass Onion) struggles to raise his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett, Black Panther), in a secular household. At the same time, devout Baptists Miranda (Sugarland vocalist Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz, 2010’s Fair Play) prepare for the baptism of their daughter, Katherine (newcomer Olivia Marcum). The week before the ceremony, Angela and Katherine disappear for three days when they ditch school to try and commune with Angela’s mother. Once found, the two act out by wetting their beds, masturbating during a Sunday service and psychically levitating furniture. (You know, teen stuff.)

Notice anything missing from that premise? Maybe, I don’t know, an exorcist? Ann (Ann Dowd, Compliance), a would-be nun turned nurse, plays the new Damien Karras. She even has a compelling background, as the shame of an abortion before her confirmation sets her up for a redemption arc. Tragically, Green makes no conscious effort to explore this beyond rushed exposition dumps.

What the filmmaker misses — and will probably keep missing — is what most imitators fail to capture, too. The Exorcist doesn’t earn its staying power through the gratuitous and demonic possession, but with compelling characters. In Believer, Green and co. almost get it with Victor and Ann’s background, but they repeatedly avoid exploring people in favor of cheap thrills and frankly boring sequences. At the same time, they reaffirm the idea of faith (specifically, Christianity) so much, there’s no room for doubt to emerge as a meaningful theme.

Beyond revenue, it’s hard to imagine what gave Green (or anyone involved with this garbage fire) the confidence to move forward with Believer. It’s as if the demon of boring horror requels — let’s call it “Pasnoozu” — has grown more powerful.

Granted, Believer is so bad, it might make the rest of the trilogy better by extension. After all, when the bar’s so low it’s basically in hell, 2025’s The Exorcist: Deceiver can’t be worse, right? Right?! —Daniel Bokemper

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Italy’s The Goldsmith has a story so simple, it could be told within the span of a trailer. And it is.

A home invasion thriller with torture porn quietly hiding in the guest bedroom while the adults talk, Vincenzo Ricchiuto’s directorial debut centers on three ne’er-do-wells who plot to rob the titular kind, elderly jeweler, Antonio (Giuseppe Pambieri, The Legend of Sea Wolf). They’re tipped off that Antonio keeps a pricey lab in the remote abode he shares with his equally kind, equally elderly wife (Stefania Casini, 1977’s Suspiria).

As the criminals discover, the cats become the mice when Antonio trips an alarm, sealing them inside the room they so maliciously plundered moments before. Via A/V magic, the goldsmith teases and turns the felons against one another. And then a hidden door is discovered, revealing stairs leading down. What lies beneath? It’s not exactly Barbarian.

But like cubic zirconia trying to pass itself off as a diamond, enough of a resemblance is there. Bearing a touch of the brothers Grimm, it might work wonders as an episode of Tales from the Crypt, but prolonged arguments in an enclosed space don’t always make for great cinema. Many unnecessary scenes pad the length, like when a character explains (via flashbacks) what we as viewers already have surmised.

Ricchiuto has an eye for this sort of thing, giving it an all-pro visual polish. His script with Eaters’ Germano Tarricone, however, could rely on fewer clichés; three times, it pulls the ol’ trick of a tormented person conveniently within reach of a weapon their oppressor fails to notice. —Rod Lott

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Beloved memories from your childhood are primed for slaughter again. As if the same cast members, stretch of UK property and general lackadaisical approach to the creative process don’t immediately give it away, the shilling-ante slasher Mary Had a Little Lamb emerges from the British colons of the British makers of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, likely the worst movie I’ve seen grace a theater screen. (What’s next, “Three Blind Mice”? Yes, now that you mention it.)

Carla (May Kelly) hosts a true-crime radio show on cases almost as cold as her ratings. On the verge of cancellation, she’s given one week to find fresher content … or else! With a posse of five tagalongs, Carla alights to the woodlands to investigate a missing couple. What her nose for news reveals is ghastly: a kooky crone named Mary (newcomer Christine Ann Nyland) who has a lamb for an adult son and constantly hums the titular nursery rhyme. What are the odds?

Actually, the lamb is an upright man-lamb who’s the product of rape and likes to kill people. Worse, he’s homeschooled.

The movie’s even more grueling second half entails the radio gang walking through overly dark corridors and stairwells while Lamb (as he/it’s credited) and his weapon of choice pursue them. Like the Pooh of the aforementioned turd, Lamb’s head is always stationary with no movable parts. It resembles an emaciated ALF with all of the skin diseases. Attempting to make this menacing, Gaston Alexander resorts to flailing arms and unintelligible gurgles and growls that echo within his mascot head of a costume. Think of a minotaur, but with glued tufts of mangy cotton where the bull noggin would be. Ewe.

After ripping off Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s legendary dinner scene, director Jason Arber (Divide by Zero) rips off Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s iconic ending … and then sticks with its truck for several more beats than even untrained editors know is allowable — so long, you expect a transition into anything but the closing credits. This is not Mary’s only instance of wasted time.

Being less pedestrian than Blood and Honey, this Lamb has a leg up on its relative. We’re talking by a minuscule amount, so be sure to go with something else. If you insist upon being fleeced, however, pair it not with a nice mint sauce, but loads of peppermint schnapps. —Rod Lott

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No hole-to-hole stitching required in the human centipede story Creepy Crawly. Known in its home country of Thailand as The One Hundred (as in legs, duh), the film lets not only many centipedes run loose, but also a rather large one that gains size as it inhabits — then discards — a string of human hosts.

Co-directed and co-written by Chalit Krileadmongkon (The Beast Below) and Pakphum Wongjinda (2015’s The Mirror), it all goes down in a hotel during the COVID-19 outbreak, so guests are under a strict, 14-day quarantine. Every guest ignores the rules when the ’pedes impede.

That includes our nominal leads, prawn-allergic pretty boy Leo (Mike Angelo of Renny Harlin’s The Misfits) and blood-disordered pretty girl Tevika (Chanya McClory, Sang Krasue 2); however, all the characters are minimally drawn. Around the time Leo and Tevika get heroic, the tongue-in-cheek creature feature in an enclosed setting becomes reminiscent of Stephen Sommers’ Deep Rising.

The idea of an insect possessing people is unique, as far as I recall. As the big bug instantly bewitches people, the risus sardonicus evil washing over their face looks inspired by Asian horror manga — the good kind, from masters like Junji Ito, Kazuo Umezu and Hideshi Hino. We also have tentacles, or something like it, purely for impalement purposes. Passable overall, how well Creepy Crawly works scene to scene tends to run in inverse proportion to usage of rush-rendered CGI. —Rod Lott

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