Courtney Gets Possessed review

By Simon Thompson

Mitchell and Hatfield’s Courtney Gets Possessed is a horror-comedy that is neither funny nor scary, but it is an interminable slog that somehow managed to make a ninety-minute run time feel like four hours.

In a nutshell, Courtney Gets Possessed is about a woman named Courtney who gets possessed by the devil right before her wedding to her husband Glen. In steps a gang of SNL castoffs, aka the wedding party consisting of Glen, Courtney’s close friends Lexi and Jasmine, and Courtney’s brother and sister Chuck and Caitlan (the latter of whom has a strained relationship with Courtney and Chuck) to ward off the forces of hell. 

The comedy in this movie is about as funny as having all of your toenails ripped off with a pair of pliers, the banter between the wedding party isn’t even on the level of a good dad joke and the parodies are obvious and overdone. If you’re going to parody a movie like The Exorcist which has been satirised far better by countless writers and comedians, you’d better find a new angle to mock it from otherwise it’s just recycling old jokes that were much funnier when done by other people.

For a comedy-horror to work generally you need to keep the main characters as determinedly sceptical as possible- take some of the best examples of the genre in Shaun of The Dead, Gremlins, Evil Dead II, Scream, and An American Werewolf in London. All of these examples work because they balance a knowing self-awareness that the characters have in regard to their situations with carefully observed sharp dialogue- as well as remembering to cultivate an uneasy tense atmosphere and a strong plot. Courtney Gets Possessed on other hand offers you extremely tepid banter and an atmosphere which is about as scary as one of SpongeBob SquarePants’s campfire ghost stories.

Overall, I find little to recommend with Courtney Gets Possessed, despite some beautiful use of colours in specific places (e.g the opening sequence at the wedding party or the majority of the possession scenes) it fails at both genres it tries miserably. The only way I would recommend this movie is if you’re some sort of masochist type who would like to torture yourself by spending ninety minutes with the world’s most irritating comedy workshop group.