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Rating: We are dealing with the Diable who is almost certainly getting ready to don the wedding dress, just as the beautiful nurse Emily Blair (Ellen Hollman) is about to do in this very The Secrets of Emily Blair, ready to happily marry her beloved William (Will Kemp) and thus live a carefree future, at least until a bad and unexpected encounter with a not-so-reputable homeless person during a hospital shift is about to suddenly change everything. Showing progressively stranger and more violent behaviors, Emily seems to be under the control of a dark demonic force ready to overwhelm her, though not before the skeptical Father Avital (a bewildered and unconvinced Colm Meaney) and the combative excommunicated ex-priest Roizman (Adrian Paul, a revived and bloated television Highlander) attempt to perform the usual spectacular liberating exorcism. For anyone still harboring any faint hopes or expectations regarding the demon-film genre, viewing The Secrets of Emily Blair should be enough as definitive proof of the total lack of possible developments within a genre that has objectively (and literally) given up the ghost and now appears entirely ossified and withered, rendering Joseph P. Genier's attempt – a prolific Canadian producer with the only direction of an episode of the series Teen Wolf to his name – to scrape the bottom of a very dry barrel utterly futile and, to say the least, embarrassing. Shamelessly deploying the entire array of clichés in the sector (an abundance of profanity, guttural voices from the Beyond, bone-breaking contortions, and the inevitable ordinance regurgitation) and throwing into the mix names like Sherilyn Fenn and William McNamara, while also demanding earnest involvement in such a mishmash, Genier concocts something ill-defined that has neither head nor tail and deserves lynching solely for the reckless use of effects (anything but) special, worthy only of an After Effects amateur, not to mention the staging of a disconcerting diabolical entity resembling one of the GORMITIS in every way. The infernal beast that Emily (Rose?) Blair (the witch?) carries within her certainly has nothing to do with the much more tempting and lustful one of Maruschka Detmers in Marco Bellocchio's film. Rather, it evidences itself as yet another stereotypical anti-Christian infestation inheriting from Regan MacNeil/Linda Blair, capable of coming to life only through acts of erotic-prurient nature – now anything but provocative – and through a rain of verbal vulgarities reaching its climax in the now patented exorcism sequence on the wobbly bed, here partially transposed to a location that vaguely recalls Soavi's The Church. Leaving us questioning what the true secrets hidden by Emily Blair between the frames of such an incoherent film are, Genier's debut work offers nothing new, except for some tasty notes of couleur at the edge of camp constituted by the use of a crucifix as a weapon of offense, plus an unprecedented holy water kiss and the first demon in the world whose only (super?)power seems to be draining the batteries of tablets, i-pads, and cellphones in no time@#¥*.
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