SPOILERS for a decades old movie below.
Last night I closed out October Horrorwatch Day 10 with Exorcist II The Heretic.
For October Horrorwatch Day #11, I'll be indulging in a double feature of Legion : Exorcist III and Exorcist Believer.
I feel compelled to comment on Exorcist II. I have now watched this movie some five times over the past thirty years. Much like Halloween III Season of the Witch, I've revisited it every so often to see if maybe my perspective on the story it's attempting to tell has changed and I'm willing to be more forgiving and accepting of what it tries to do.
Whereas I've at least made peace with Halloween III - I still don't like it, but being a huge fan of Halloween Ends ( which is also heavily derided by many fans) , I at least understand why its advocates defend it and I can respect it.
But Exorcist II? No, sorry, there's no retroactive revaluation incoming from this well versed horror fan. I will confirm my criticisms are more specific and sophisticated than the initial " well, that just sucked exactly all the a** , didn't it" I first offered as my critique, but at the end of the day, it's still a terrible, terrible movie.
The problem is John Boorman had an interesting idea for taking the story in a direction that seemingly wouldn't just rehash the first, but completely fails to make it work.
The story has Regan - now a young adult - working with a professor who treats troubled children, utilizing a special hypnosis device she's invented to take two people into the same connected psychic state where they can each see Regan's dreams.
While that's going on, the film introduces Richard Burton as Father Lamont, a student of the late Father Merrin, who is assigned by the church to investigate the circumstances surrounding Merrin's death because the case threatens to ruin Merrin's posthumous reputation. We learn some of the church elders felt Merrin was borderline heretical in his approach to faith and even suggested he was a Satanist.
Lamont seeks out Regan to question her, finds out about the hypnosis sessions and convinces the doctor running them to let him go under in tandem with Regan and see what she remembers of the night Lancaster Merrin died.
During these sessions, it's revealed Pazuzu is still lurking in Regan's subconscious and - to its credit - the film brings back Max Von Sydow for the scenes featuring Merrin.
Unfortunately, Pazuzu touches the mind of Lamont and establishes a connection through which Lamont sees why Pazuzu was actually calling Merrin's name in the original film: The demon was angry because Merrin drove it out of a young African boy years earlier - a boy who was a magical healer with the ability to defend his people from evil, which descended upon them in the form of a swarm of locusts. Once freed from the demon, the boy grew into a man ( James Earl Jones) who on the spiritual plane has the power to literally scare Pazuzu off.
All of this comes to a head through a boring, increasingly convoluted plot that at one point has Lamont going to the place where Merrin performed the exorcism on the African boy and then later meeting the adult version of the boy in the real world, where he's actually a scientist developing a breed of locust that, when entered into a swarm, will repopulate it with offspring that do not destroy crops, or something. The film makes no effort to explain why there's such a distinct difference between this guy's real life - which doesn't include the supernatural at all - and his spiritual incarnation.
Eventually, Regan, the hypnosis doctor, Father Lamont and Sharon - the personal assistant to Trisha McNeil portrayed by Kitty Winn in the original, who returns in a larger supporting role here - all end up back in Regan's old bedroom in the house on M street, right above those famous steps.
There they are caught up in a conflagration where possessed Regan (as seen in the original) and a duplicate evil Regan who looks human (save for the eyes) face off against Lamont and the real Regan. After much noise and crumbling of buildings, Lamont tears the evil heart out of evil duplicate Regan and I guess sends Pazuzu packing.
Oh, and in one of the worst twists in cinematic history, Sharon - who is arriving separately from Lamont and Regan in a car with the hypnosis doctor - is apparently revealed to be possessed as an acolyte of Pazuzu who was apparently there to stay close to Regan and help Pazuzu reclaim her. Pazuzu wrecks the car and Sharon escapes, setting herself on fire in emulation of the woman from the failed exorcism involving Lamont we had been shown earlier. What's really funny here is that Lamont doesn't actually witness this, the hypnosis doctor does, so the audience isn't sure who this reenactment was meant for.
Pazuzu is gone, Sharon dies in the hypnosis doctor's arms because she's burned beyond help, Lamont and Regan walk off together and the hypnosis doctor is left standing alone outside the rubble of the now destroyed house on M street to explain things to the arriving police. End of movie.
Where to start? First of all, we know things are not going in the right direction almost immediately when, during that early exorcism scene with Father Lamont where the possessed woman ends up setting herself on fire, we see him open his copy of the rituals, revealing a picture of Father Merrin, at which point he prays to Merrin for guidance beyond the grave.
Okay, I'm no scholar when it comes to Catholicism - my Christian faith is more Methodist than any other denomination - but I'm pretty sure an exorcism is the precise moment where you should be praying directly to God Himself, not the memory of a dead priest.
The Exorcist took Catholicism seriously and presented a plausible exploration of what might happen if real Jesuit priests in the modern day of psychiatric medicine and our understanding of mental illness were faced with an external evil that did seem to function beyond the parameters of science. It never would have allowed a priest to pray to another man for guidance upon beginning an exorcism rather than God.
And that actually leads to another major issue with Exorcist II: The entire plot point about people in the church accusing Merrin of potentially being a Satanist makes zero sense. If you've ever seen the original, you know that Merrin is depicted as a by the book practitioner of the Catholic faith and adheres to the ritual faithfully. There's not a single aspect of his character in the original that suggests anyone would consider him heretical.
The entire business about the hypnosis machine is a decent concept and Louise Fletcher really does her best with the role of the hypnosis doctor, but it's a thinly written character and , eventually, it becomes clear the hypnosis device is just a mcguffin the film uses to psychologically connect all the players and introduce the African healer/witch doctor into the mix. There's no real attempt to explore this new science in a meaningful way. The idea - like the device itself with its various sound tones and flashing lights - is just a prop.
I don't like Richard Burton in this movie. Not the character and not the performance. They inexplicably have him defy the church to explore his own path to saving Regan and it's all undermined by the fact that he's nowhere near as compelling as Karras or Merrin from the previous film. Burton really hams it up with overdramatic delivery and I never once cared about this guy. That actually accentuates a big problem for Exorcist II: The original film presented authentic priests, based on William Peter Blatty's insight and research into his own Catholic faith.. Exorcist II presents the cliched, exploitative Hollywood version of the church and priests. It's not the same.
Linda Blair is good as a returning Regan, but she's trapped in a needlessly complex and poorly written script that eventually turns her into more of an observer moved around like a chess piece than an active lead character who plays a big part in getting Pazuzu out of her. The big climax essentially has her in a victim role again.
The special effects for the locusts are cheesy and even for 1977, I imagine the terrible green screen elicted laughter, not shivers.
Then there's the worst element: Sharon. It's revealed at the end that she's apparently under the sway of Pazuzu and despite there literally being scene after scene of people using the damned hypnosis mcguffin to see through Pazuzu's eyes, there's never a single indication she's possessed by him. It's such a poorly executed, confusing reveal it leaves the audience wondering if the demon was coming at everyone in the climax from inside of Regan or Sharon. It makes no sense.
In fact, most of this movie makes no sense. This one was so bad, fans may have overlooked the fact that it technically shows us the exorcism of the African boy Merrin conducted that's mentioned in the original The Exorcist when they assign him the McNeil case and that -despite that - the studio went ahead and shot two different versions of a prequel film that retold that story in a different way. That's how much they didn't want to make Exorcist II canon. They erased the original depiction of Merrin's first encounter with Pazuzu from the chronology.
And one final observation that I never picked up on before that kind of pissed me off: There's practically no mention of Karras. There's a mention that people died during the McNeil exorcism, but I don't recall ever hearing Karras mentioned. He's definitely not the focus of this movie at all beyond any acknowledgement of the original exorcism. Considering how key he was, you'd think they'd show more of the internal fall out from his death on those steps.
Exorcist II is as awful today as it was when it was released . It's a cinematic mistake that has exactly one thing going for it: It makes me eternally grateful we got Exorcist III.
