SPEAK OF THE DEVIL

Here I thought the latest variant of the Coronavirus was the scourge we all had to worry about most. But “Prey for the Devil” tells us at the outset that demonic possession is the epidemic that matters most.

And the Catholic Church is ready, willing and able to help us out.

The story takes place at an exorcism school that’s ostensibly in Boston, although the end credits offer an impressive list of names that appear to be Russian in origin, or at least Bulgarian, so no one here pahks their cah in Hahvid Yahd. Try Sofia.

In the basement of said school are high-tech isolation cells, the treatment rooms for those suffering from demonic possession. And only young priests, like wizards-in-training at Hogwarts, are allowed to act when the school’s medical team fails in its mission; it’s off-limits to nuns.

At the heart of the story is a young nun, Sister Ann, played by Jacqueline Byers, who seems bent on breaking the rules and who develops a strange fixation on a ten-year-old girl, Natalie, who shows the first signs of a deal with the devil. She doesn’t vomit pea soup a la Linda Blair in “The Exorcist,” but she holds her own in the sudden scare department.

Natalie can crawl up walls and twist herself into a human pretzel at will. And she takes to Sister Ann immediately, foreshadowing a showdown that’s not hard to figure out ahead of time.

Ann singlehandedly challenges the school’s administrators and, by extension, the Catholic Church in her seemingly impossible quest to rid her young charge of Beelzebub himself. She’s a superhero in a habit.

There’s a lot of exposition about Catholic guilt that went right over my head, since I didn’t grow up in the Catholic tradition. But we learn along the way the hardest cases of possession are transferred to Rome where the Vatican is the court of last resort.

For reasons I won’t divulge here, Ann refuses to allow that to happen to Natalie, despite the misgivings of everyone around her. And that’s even after the possessed Natalie kills a priest and two medics during an ambulance ride.

As an aside, this was one of the final two films to feature British actor Ben Cross, best known to American audiences as the hero of “Chariots of Fire.” In “Prey,” he plays Cardinal Matthews of Boston with impressive gravitas. Cross died in 2020 at 72 before the film’s release.

“Prey for the Devil” is rated PG-13, but it’s not appropriate for younger moviegoers. Mostly because the story is just too dense and dark for kids to follow.