Sequelizing William Friedkin’s The Exorcist was never going to be an easy job as, for all intents and purposes, it’s as perfect a horror film as you’re ever likely to get. Crafting a intense story that hinged on faith, the corruption of innocence and the effects of catching bright green puke right between the eyes, it still remains a starkly affecting experience to this day and rightly remains near the top of many lists compiling the greatest horror movies ever made.
However, if John Boorman’s ill-advised follow up, Exorcist II: The Heretic was to top any list, it could be a strong contender for the title of the worst sequel ever go before cameras as it takes the haunting realism of Friedkin’s masterpiece and trades it all in for psychic mumbo jumbo, locust gods and a machine that helps you look into other peoples memories. Bad horror sequels are a dime a dozen, ask any fan and they’ll regale you with countless disappointments with a number after it’s title, but Exorcist II is a whole different level of crap that’ll have you openly wondering what on earth possessed them…
Four years have past since young Regan MacNeil had her close encounter of the demonic kind after getting possessed by a malevolent entity at the age of twelve and whild she has no memory of her traumatic experience, she is being monitored at a psychiatric institute at the request of her mother.
Meanwhile, troubled priest Phillip Lamont is approached by the Cardinal to investigate the death of Father Lankester Merrin who suffered a humongous coronary while liberating Regan from her unwanted, head twisting guest and now has to suffer the further indignity of facing posthumous heresy charges due to his writings about Satan – something the modernizing church wants to brush under the carpet. Unsurprisingly, Lamont is having a crisis of faith himself after a previous exorcism he performed went disastrously south in Latin America, but to get answers, he approaches both Regan and her doctor, Gene Tuskin, for help.
What he gets is first person trip to that fateful girls bedroom in Washington all those years ago as the institute has something called a “synchronizer”, a revolutionary machine that uses hypnotism to synch up the brainwaves to two people as to let them view their memories first hand (stay with me now).
Learning that the possessing demon is called Pazuzu, Lamont uses the remnants of the creature that still lurk in Regan’s mind, to discover that Merrin had tangled with the demonic fuck once before when he ousted Puzazu from a child in Africa.
From here, things start to get a little strange and immensely stupid as Regan and Lamont use their mental link to uncover the secrets of Puzazu in order to vanquish it once and for all.
John Boorman is hardly a director known for turning in quiet, introspective character studies as evidenced by such diverse, brain-frying and brilliant projects such as Deliverance, Excalibur and Zardoz, but even I was taken aback a how pointlessly weird Exorcist II really is. Friedkin approached the horrific excesses of his seminal classic with an approach that was deadlier than a heart attack, using counterintuitive editing to keep audiences off balance and approaching the corruption of a teenage girl with unflinching severity. Boorman, on the other hand, shoots for an ethereal, erratic and utterly melodramatic dreamlike tone, but instead his aim goes horribly wild and he bullseyes moronic instead. Usually I try not to be too critical of sequel continuity if a new director hops on board because everybody has to find their individual voice, regardless of plot constraints, I get it – but virtually everything that occurs in The Heretic seems to directly goes against everything Friedkin and author William Peter Blatty was originally going for.
The whole point of Regan’s original possession is supposed to signify how despairing random evil can be and that no one is truly safe from things we can’t understand, not even the daughter of a wealthy actress living in Washington D.C., however, the sequel immediately subverts that by suggesting that Regan was targeted by the demon Puzazu because she apparently has some sort of virtuous, gift of healing – a talent that’s shown in a tone deaf moment when she cures an autistic girl of her muteness by accident. So if that’s true and Puzazu has attacked other children with this gift before, the events are no longer random and therefore no longer scary.
Further diluting the scares is the script’s insistence that the entire plot has to be hinged on trippy, biofeedback machines that like you mind meld into each others memories like Mr. Spock which leads to numerous scenes of the actors staring blankly at each other as strobe lights flash in their faces in an attempt to make it seem like something is actually happening. Elsewhere, Boorman attacks us with countless scenes of a superimposed locust and the camera drifting lazily over a model of a lost African temple that come accompanied by screeching chants that sound like a Yoko Ono solo album.
The cast, forged of tried and true acting heavyweights such as Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, Ned Beatty, James Earl Jones and a returning Max Von Sydow, all have a crazy amount of accolades between them, but you wouldn’t know it from the performances they give here as they all dreamily utter their lines as if there’s a powerful gas leak somewhere near the set. Burton, in particular, is splendidly awful, fixing a haggard, empty, thousand yard stare on his face for scenes even where he isn’t supposed to be hypnotised and I don’t mean to make fun of his legendary problems with alcohol, but judging by this performance I honestly can’t figure out if he’s drunk too much or not enough. Probably both…
And still the frustrating carnival of weirdness continues – why would anyone think that a scene were a psychically linked Regan thrashed around on stage as Lamont gets stones thrown at him by terrified locals in Africa while she’s the middle of a tap dancing routine mange to be a worthy successor to any of the horrors witness in the first film.
Those who adore bad films will no doubt gorge themselves silly from the various, belly laugh inducing pitfalls of such an impressive misfire – the sight of a screaming James Earl Jones dressed as a locust alone is enough to ensure that even a single viewing vital – but compared to its successor, it’s something of a insult.
Misguided, silly and at times out and out completely fucking stupid; to describe Exorcist II as blasphemy may be a bit strong – but it’s certainly heresy…
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