Exorcism: The Possession of Gail Bowers is not quite as terrible as the rating and some of the reviews suggest, but it is disheartening when a movie gets off to a good start but from beyond that point is lacking in a lot of areas. There are things that were halfway-decent, good even. The best thing about Exorcism: The Possession of Gail Bowers is the opening, which is quite intense and fun to watch, a promising start indeed. The priest-on-priest murder scene has also been mentioned elsewhere as another good scene, that was shocking and fairly well done too. A couple of performances shone through(from personal opinion the acting was more uneven rather than good or bad), Griff Furst is touching, his character Clark like the others is clichéd but also one of the more likable ones, and while he does overact at times Thomas Downey is the very meaning of bad-ass. The ladies are sensual to look at, the old-school make-up looked very effective and the special effects are okay, a little better than expected(hardly award-worthy though). Unfortunately David Schick is over-the-top and annoying and Erica Roby's, though not without her good moments, inexperience does show. After such a promising beginning, the last two thirds of the movie don't match at all, the middle was rather tedious and with very little tension, too much padding was a major problem in this regard, and the ending/final half-hour is bloated and all-over-the-place(very kitchen-sink quality). Exorcism: The Possession of Gail Bowers we know from the get go is low-budget, but the production values are really slipshod, often too blurry, darkly-lit and claustrophobic-looking and to say the editing is terrible is an understatement, choppy and we can even see irrelevant objects either in corners or full-view. The dialogue is stilted and contains a lot of misplaced humour- intentional and unintentional-, this couldn't be more true in the more serious-toned scenes(including the exorcism) where there is a one-liner that single-handedly hurts the scene. The story is too padded, devoid and atmosphere and sometimes felt like a string of derivative and inferior rip-offs that are as misplaced as some of the humour. The direction isn't amateurish as such but there definitely could have been more flow and balance between tension and comedy because it all felt disjointed, while we never get to connect with the characters either, Clark is the most likable and we don't learn much about him either apart from what role he's serving in the story and in relation to the title character. All in all, started off good but the rest was a sprinkle of decent and a lot of mediocre and bad. 4/10 Bethany Cox