Series Review: Bad Exorcist

 

Overview: 
Poland is suffering from an infestation of the most horrific kind, A demon infestation. Satan is cracking down on the drunken revelry of his subjects after a rampage caused destruction and anarchy throughout Hell. Satan has implemented total prohibition on alcohol and cigarettes, and as a result, hellspawn swarm the surface to cause trouble for the living. They steal property, kill the innocent, and get knockout drunk. Only three men can stop them. The awkward teenager, Marcinek. Domino, a demon turned good. And finally, a violent, boorish man with an unending love for alcohol and pornography. This man’s name is… Boner. Bogdan Boner.

Our Take:

Let this be an ill omen for how this show will turn out. The main character’s name is Boner, and yes, he is referred to as such by everybody. This goes doubly for the show’s original title in Polish, “Bodgan Boner, Egzorcysta”, where his name taints even the title of the show. It sets the tone of the show almost immediately, I give it that. It gives the impression of Bad Exorcist being a ludicrously crass, immature show full of cringe-worthy sex jokes, and lo and behold, that’s exactly what we got. I absolutely hate this name. It’s not cool or interesting, it’s not something relevant to Polish culture, it’s just “HAHAHA, Look at the funny sex joke. He’s named after an erection. Laugh at the funny sex joke everybody!” 

Bad Exorcist is an adult sitcom that follows a classic monster of the week formula. They introduce some new demon or demonic phenomenon that’s hassling the living, and it’s up to Boner, Marcinek, and Domino to stop it. Boner is the head of an exorcist business, with Marcinek and Domino as his underpaid, overworked employees. While Boner is an exorcist by title, his occupation in practice turns out to be more of a demon hunter, with Boner performing his exorcisms with bullets, bombs, and farming equipment on one occasion. Expect massive amounts of gore and blood, which is drawn with lots of detail.

If only the actual character designs were given that much care. The characters in this show look monstrously ugly, the demons and humans combined. The demons are either gigantic buff monstrosities or lanky small imps, and they have rather prominent genitals. Domino in particular usually never wears clothing, so his tiny little dick is visible whenever he’s on screen. They never really do anything with it though, he’s just a nudist demon for the sake of him being a nudist demon. 

Not that the humans look much better. Boner is gross and misshapen, poorly drawn, and with a prominent chin that looks like a ballsack. Which describes nearly every human character in the series, come to think of it. And if they’re a woman, the odds are good that they have massive, sagging tits. The humans are invariably hideous and disgusting to look at, poorly designed and shoddily drawn, with awful animation to boot. The characters move very jerkily around the screen, choppily animated. The way they bob back and forth when they move reminds me of South Park, but at least South Park’s characters looked a lot more charming than these. 

Another aspect of the character design that I greatly dislike is the tendency to mix scanned photo assets in with regular animation. One of the recurring characters is a rival exorcist, a pompous blonde asshole that somehow reminds me of Elon Musk. He is begrudgingly forced to team up with Boner on occasion, favoring holy weaponry like throwing daggers in lieu of Boner’s shotgun. He wears a jacket, but it’s not animated like normal, it’s a photo of an actual jacket pasted onto his character model. It just looks so jarring when it’s done this way. They don’t do this too often, but having it on a major recurring character still looks awkward each time it appears.

Sound is a fairly mixed bag, which makes it a high point of the show, sadly. There’s very little music and they recycle the same few dramatic stings constantly, but the voice actors are pretty decent. Not amazing, but they’re reasonably competent, and they do the best they can with the material provided.

At its worst, the show looks like it is straight off of mid-2000’s Newgrounds, completely amateurish, like something a group of horny teenagers would make in homage to their favorite animated sitcoms. This amateurish feeling also comes through in the writing. The characters never really evolve beyond the most basic of tropes. Boner is always either angry, greedy, or running away from a demon in terror. Marcinek always whines about not getting paid, and not getting to spend time with his girlfriend. The writers don’t seem to have any idea what to do with Domino, but he eventually settles into a fish out of water role with him having many misconceptions about human culture.

Jokes are of the lowest common denominator. There are a lot of cringe-worthy sex jokes, particularly early on. I recall one instance where they misspeak the name of a character of the week, and the entire joke is that they call him Tits instead of Fitz. Not to mention two other characters named Foreskin and Peestein. Scatological humor is in abundance too, with many characters puking and peeing themselves. This is humor that only a 12-year-old could find funny.

The show routinely rejects any opportunity to be more interesting. The closest thing this show has to a plot arc in the first season comes in towards the end, where the monster of the week is revealed to be Boner’s son, though how this happened is never confirmed. Boner lets him flee, and he comes back in a later episode used as bait by Satan to lure him in. It’s not a particularly original setup, but it’s at least something, and it’s the most I was engaged throughout watching this entire show. But in the end, they decide to throw it all away for the sake of a cheap movie reference. The same happens to another recurring villain, some kind of demon cowboy. They’re moderately interesting and fun to watch, but they’re killed off so suddenly that it feels like a cop-out.

Episodes also tend to end very abruptly. One particular example I’ll give is Season 1 Episode 6, the first appearance of the demon cowboy. He has them standing on chairs with nooses around their neck, with a crowd around them cheering for them to be hanged. Then one guy’s wife comes in and hits him with a purse, which makes ALL of them flee. Even the demon cowboy. Our heroes are still hanging, and the episode ends with yet another joke about Marcinek and Domino not getting paid. That is one of the show’s most common recurring jokes, and never once is it funny.

Despite the first season being pretty awful overall, it somehow got a second one. A second one that, much to my surprise, actually manages to improve somewhat. The animation looks slightly better, or at the very least, less amateurish. The background art was truly awful in the first episode, with crowds of demons rendered as featureless gray blobs, but in Season 2, the background art is probably the best art in the entire show. The backgrounds are well-detailed and have a lot of neat color usage. And the show actually made me laugh a few times. It largely ditches the low-effort sex jokes, much to it’s benefit.

Despite a second season with some improvements, the show still winds up very disappointing overall. Season 1 was a miserable watch, and while Season 2 is slightly better, it is nowhere near enough to make it a worthwhile watch. Bad Exorcist ends up being as it’s title implies, Bad. It winds up feeling more like a fan tribute rather than something that a team of professionals made. If this was on Newgrounds in 2008, this would probably have turned some heads, but as is, as a professionally made show on Netflix in 2022, this isn’t worthy of your time.