Main cast: Ryan Guzman (Max), Kyle Gallner (Drew), Alix Angelis (Lane), Chris Lew Kum Hoi (Chris), Emma Holzer (Riley), Daniel Hoffmann-Gill (Tommy), and Matt Raimo (Derek)
Director: Damien LeVeck

The Cleansing Hour is the name of the live stream show which sees a priest, the handsome and charismatic Father Max, performing a live exorcism. If one believes the credits, the show is endorsed by the Vatican. The show is pretty popular, gaining a few hundred thousand viewers per episode, a number that I’m sure some current live streamers will sell their parents for. However, Max is not happy. He still hasn’t received the official blue check from Twitter—you know, that tick that lets everyone know that the person is a mentally unstable loser hell bent on cancelling people with more fulfilling lives for quick dopamine fix—and he’s pretty sure the viewership could be bigger. Much bigger, as big as his pee-pee.

Yes, Max is a terrible narcissist. His best friend Drew is the engineer, sounds guy, and researcher for the show, and Max treats him like utter crap. Luckily for Max, Drew is still enough of a doormat to stay on, although Drew’s fiancée Lane will love nothing more than to see her man break it off from Max for good. Also, Drew’s parents wish that he’d go do better things with his talent and experience. Drew tries to express his conflicted feelings to Max, but Max, of course, brushes him off because he’d rather talk about himself.

Also, Max is a fake. He is not a real priest, and each episode is a carefully put-together scripted show. As you can imagine, eventually the real folks from down below will take notice of this insulting perfidy, and one of them decides to crash the party during the latest episode. Worse, it just happens that Max’s guest, a drag queen that will act like she’s possessed, is a no-show, and Drew has to ask Lane to step in as the guest at the last minute. Lane agrees, and before everyone can say “Right on cue…, the poor dear is genuinely possessed by a demon that proceeds to taunt the two of them. As the viewer count soars to new heights, the demon steps up the torment, and soon people get to view live immolation and evisceration on whatever streaming channel this show is taking place on.

This movie is clearly outdated by now, of course, because you know none of the current big social media platforms will allow this kind of non-corporate friendly stuff to show on their platforms—half-naked young women cavorting in bath tubs or bending over to the camera under the guise of “carrying a conversation” excepted, of course, because that’s just strong independent women being progressive or something—especially one that features a straight white man claiming to be a Christian person of authority. The only way Twitch will allow this show to be on is if Max had been a trans non-binary self-proclaimed socialist of color exorcising the whiteness or straightness out of xeir guests.

Anyway, back to this show,  the whole thing is shockingly derivative to anyone that had even seen one show of this sort. Quick, hands up people that can’t see coming that Max had did something bad to Drew that he had been keeping from that man, and that something bad is the same bad thing that comes up in nine of 10 such shows. This show seems to be a step-by-step “let’s take stuff from other movies and assemble them here” affair, so much so that the whole “demon versus bewildered humans” thing feel like a tired old throwback to better movies of this sort. Whether it’s The Exorcist, the original Evil Dead, et cetera, this one seems to be trying very hard to emulate what is good about those films, but lacks the ability to execute things well. It comes off in the end as a movie that is trying, but not exactly succeeding in being a distinctive movie in its own right.

Also, there is a tonal issue with this movie. For most of its run time, it plays itself straight like a very sober and very serious horror movie, but sometimes it will veer off into some over the top, almost farcical comedic moment that I feel like I’d somehow stumbled onto a completely different movie. This only reinforces my impression that the movie tries to cover a lot of grounds in order to be many things at once, but it doesn’t quite know how to do all these things in a coherent manner.

Still, the whole thing is somewhat entertaining, mostly because the three main characters put on a far better performance than the movie deserves. Max is a terrible person, but he’s a fun character to root against, while Drew is a doormat that somehow still comes off as a most endearing underdog.

Then, the last 15 minutes happen. The movie stupidly decides to show me the demon responsible for this thing and I see instead some of the worst CGI I’ve come across in a movie in a while. The ending makes no sense considering what is happening around the main characters, and this thing goes off the rails so completely that I can’t in good conscience recommend this thing. Sure, Ryan Guzman takes off his clothes here for a short while now, but come on. he has shown more in some of his other roles, so that is not really a good reason to watch The Cleansing Hour. Just cleanse this out of the to-watch list and go see something else.