"The Vatican Tapes" (Guardian 30/10/15)

The Vatican Tapes **

Dir: Mark Neveldine. With: Olivia Taylor Dudley, Michael Peña, Dougray Scott, Kathleen Robertson. 91 mins. Cert: 15

Hallowe’eners should emerge tickled if hardly spooked by this daft, zeitgeisty artefact, in which the Devil expands into new media by possessing a bodacious blonde blogger (Olivia Taylor Dudley), whose symptoms – instigating bird attacks, apostrophising the possessive “its” – have the Pope’s men jetting into L.A. Crank’s Mark Neveldine puts the camera in unusual, diverting places – his found-footage scraps display a freshness the recent The Visit lacked – but everyone’s working from diabolically thin material: concerned dad Dougray Scott utters a dozen variants of “I don’t understand this!”, while priest Michael Peña has only to lay out the Eucharistic knick-knacks before the inevitable Exorcist-rehashing finale. There, Taylor Dudley levitates, briefly vanishes, and produces a series of eggs from her mouth: she resembles the Antichrist far less than she does Debbie McGee.

The Vatican Tapes opens in cinemas nationwide today.