If there was an Academy Award for film titles; I would nominate The Pickleball Exorcist. Do you remember the first time you heard of Pickleball? I thought this “game” was a joke and that it somehow involved batting real pickles with Ping Pong paddles. I learned what the sport was about from every drug commercial aimed at Boomers and Gen X. They all featured a couple playing Pickleball while the announcer spewed out the side effects of their pills. How could someone play this mini-tennis with a shrunk wiffleball if they were going to have a spastic colon? Somehow Pickleball has become all the rage with people who weren’t that athletic. Tennis players around here are angry their courts are being invaded. How did this happen? I figured the people behind Pickleball had made a pact with Satan instead of Nike. Now the truth about the sport has been exposed in The Pickleball Exorcist. This microbudget horror film gets to the core evil of the plastic ball sport.
Jed Rittenhour (Death Toilet 4: Brown Snakes On A Plane‘s Mike Hartsfield) is walking through the countryside when he spots a pickleball paddle on the trail. He picks it up and sees one side has an evil face coming out of the wood that make it look like the Necronomicon of pickleball paddles. The evil comes out fast as Jed carves a pentagram into his palm with the paddle. They are blood bonded. He heads to the nearest pickleball court and proceeds to get beat by a local player. But when the guy tells Jed that he sucks, the paddle takes it personally. He orders Jed to kill the sore winner. After the massacre, Jed and the paddle head out to find more victims that need to be taken down with his backhand. Ernest Christensen (Chris Lohman) is a local cop who also does exorcisms on the side. He catches the call. This is his dream case where he can bring his two passions together to fight the possessed pickleball killer. Can anyone really stop pickleball?
The Pickleball Exorcist lives up to it’s amazing title. We gets to see what happens when a demonic force is your mixed doubles partner on the court. Writer/director Evan Jacobs really does a fun job in this microbudget horror comedy. The fights are humorous so we don’t have to feel bad that someone has been beaten to death with a demonic pickleball racket. The special effects are appropriately cheesy. At no point do you recoil in horror when he turns babies into pickleballs. The plastic body parts look like what you’d buy on Temu to get something cheaper than what’s on the shelf at Spirit Halloween. This extreme low budget adds so much to my enjoyment of the film. If Evan Jacobs had invested in Walking Dead level gore effects, we’d lose focus on what the film is really about: Pickleball is a gateway for Demonic possession. Mike Hartsfield pulls off the role of being a mindless killing machine for a pickleball paddle. You don’t doubt for a minute that he’ll hack apart a babydoll to appease his demonic master. Chris Lohman is properly weird as the cop who exorcizes. Best is when he’s doing virtual exorcisms on the phone while driving. This is a wickedly enjoyable film about pickleball.
If you have a friend, loved one, spouse or person in accounting who plays pickleball or can’t shut up about pickleball, you must buy them the DVD of The Pickleball Exorcist. I doubt there will ever be a greater film about pickleball ever produced in the world!
The Video is 1.78:1 anamorphic. The film feels like it was shot on a smartphone which is great since it makes the film a bit more realistic. The Audio is Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo. You’ll hear that plastic pop when the pickleball hits the concrete. The movie is subtitled.
Audio Commentary from Evan Jacobs. He explains it was called Pickleball Massacre. But the distributor needed a film with Exorcist in the title and thus the change happened.
Virtual Exorcism (7:44) this is an uncut deleted scene of a guy facetiming from their self-phone needing father Ernest to exorcise his date who brought him home for a one-night stand. It’s the full take with flubs included. There’s a great joke involving Cathy from the comic section.
Trailer (1:25) shows the evil of pickleball. Beware!!!
Location Scouting (4:13) has director Evan Jacobs show off footage of how he turned his backyard into the pickleball court so he didn’t have to worry about people wanting to play next. He shot most of the microbudget film in his neighborhood. He points out how he did scenes fast and don’t let people know you’re really making a feature film in front of their driveway. He admits he mixed in footage from a trip to North Carolina.
SRS presents The Pickleball Exorcist. Directed by Evan Jacobs. Screenplay by Evan Jacobs. Starring Mike Hartsfield, Chris Lohman, Paul Bradford, Francis Erdman, Brandon Farmer, Jeffrey Hylton, Christopher Korek & Rudy Ledbetter. Running Time: 75 minutes. Rating: Not Rated. Release Date: June 10, 2025.
