Prime Video had a new horror/comedy film on its streaming service this weekend called My Best Friend’s Exorcism.

According to IMDB, “The year is 1988. High school sophomores Abby (Elsie Fisher) and Gretchen (Amiah Miller) have been best friends since fourth grade. But after an evening of skinny-dipping goes disastrously wrong, Gretchen begins to act…different. She’s moody. She’s irritable. And bizarre incidents keep happening whenever she’s nearby. Abby’s investigation leads her to some startling discoveries-and by the time their story reaches its terrifying conclusion, the fate of Abby and Gretchen will be determined by a single question: Is their friendship powerful enough to beat the devil?”

I was liking the beginning of this movie. It was set in the 80s, for some reason, and we had a school setting similar to the typical movie school we see. At first, I thought things were going well. With Gretchen possessed, she turned into the ultimate mean girl and was doing terribly cruel things to her friends. However, the film went way off the rails in the second half when Abby started to look into ways to help Gretchen.

The tone of this movie was all over the place. Many times blending comedy with horror is a difficult thing to do and this film simply could not handle it. There was too much silliness that made little to no sense and it took whatever potential positives that was here and tossed it aside.

The performances were pretty weak. There was no subtlety to any of the performances in My Best Friend’s Exorcism. They introduced a character named Christian Lemon (Christopher Lowell) that was nothing more than a cartoon figure. There is no seriousness in that character at all. His involvement in the third act was one of the worst parts of the film. It felt like Shaggy from Scooby Doo was here to try and perform the exorcism.

There were some interesting moments here and there, but the fluctuating tones and the detour that the story took took any possible positives and sent them straight to Hell.

2.3 stars