I was very disappointed in Exorcist II, the obvious follow up to William Friedkin’s 1973 classic The Exorcist. My aggravation with the movie though is likely different than the rumored reactions of audiences during the film’s premiere. Commissioned by PBF while reviewing Netflix’s awesome Watch Instantly collection, I went into the film expecting it to be quite horrid based on my readings of previous reviews about the film. Normally, I try not to have any preconceived notions about a film prior to watching it as sometimes it can be hard to separate what you’ve heard from what you actually see in the film itself. I am happy to report though that all of the bashers of the film hit it dead on.
Taking place four years after the original, Reagan (played by a remarkably cute Linda Blair) is undergoing psychiatric treatment to deal with repressed memories of her possession. During a really stupid looking hypnosis treatment, she is intertwined with Father Lamont who is investigating the circumstances surrounding Father Merrin’s death at the hand of the demon in the first film. As Father Lamont digs deeper into Reagan’s subconscious (and thus that of the demon possessing her), he finds a clusterfuck of seemingly unrelated plot points and developments with some rather deplorable writing. There may be more to it, but that’s about all I cared to get out of it.
Now, as I said, I expected this to be a horrendous abomination of a horror franchise and a complete failure of a horror film. In the end, I got all of that with the exception of the horrendous adjective. Now, don’t get me wrong. This is a bad movie, probably worthy of a good ripping from the folks at MST3K, but I’ve certainly seen worse films so I was disappointed that this movie just seemed to be incompetently made instead of butchered by a bunch of no-talent ass-clowns as I had expected. I fathom you can’t get the amount of talent on this film without at least starting good. From Richard Burton, Max von Sydow, James Earl Jones, and even all thirty seconds of Ned Beatty, there seems to be a good, or at least passable, movie desperate to get out. Whether this desire was squelched by director John Boorman’s incompetence (unlikely for a guy nominated for several Oscars), studio tomfoolery, or retooling of the film late in the game remains up in the air. Allegedly though, the only reason Blair appears was due to a contractual obligation to the production prior to heavy rewrites.
Ultimately, the film falls on many fronts. For starters, as a sequel to a quite renowned and genuinely scary movie, Exorcist II had all the scares of a five-year-old’s birthday party. On the film’s Wikipedia page, Boorman is quoted in a mea culpa of sorts stating he did not meet the audiences expectations for a scary follow-up, instead going for a theme of journeys and goodness. In and of itself, this is a notable attempt to create a new advancement of the story without copying the original, but it certainly failed as it should have. Even though the movie may be shoe-horned into the expected horror genre does not mean it has to be a carbon-copy, there just has to be logical thought put into how to do it correctly. There is also the problem of the crazy aspects of the plot that come and go at will and do not add a thing to the story. Reagan has ESP abilities now? Oh well, there is no further expansion except a fleeting line an hour later. Lamont disobeys his orders to fly half-way around the world and meet a guy on a big boulder only to have rocks thrown at him. Yep, that was beneficial. Even the aspect of Merrin being investigated as a Satanist is never really resolved or even mentioned for the final thirty minutes or so. And for a continuation of a movie about demonic possession, I had expected Reagan to relapse and start the head-turning and spewing again or the demon to jump bodies or something. I think there was maybe a total of three minutes dedicated to someone actually being possessed.
Mostly, it seems that almost everything about the original was deliberately cast aside. Instead of a core group of a few characters, we now have a sprawling cast of decent actors with pretty worthless characters. So the original was mostly centered in one house? Let us go around the world now just to learn about the behavior of locust swarms. Now, admittedly it has probably been about six years or so since I last saw the original but I would likely have been less forgiving of this sequel if I had revisited it. So, in the end, we have what has been called the worst sequel ever but certainly not the worst movie ever meaning that I just watched two hours of this dreck for nothing. Instead of being able to make fun of the abysmal acting or story, I was just baffled as to why this movie was green lit in its present state. I hear Exorcist III is a much more worthy follow up so hopefully that will be the case when I get around to that.
Comments
Post a Comment