It took over ten years to exorcise the stink of John Boorman’s legendarily awful Exorcist II: The Heretic to the level that someone felt confident to put a third movie in front of film cameras, but if anyone could manage to produce something that could live up to the majesty of the original, it would be the guy who started the whole thing in the first place.
No, I’m not talking about William Friedkin and I’m not referring to God and the Devil either, but rather William Peter Blatty, the author who wrote the original source novel, but even he would soon find out that road to the onscreen for a third Exorcist movie would be every but as tortured as the poor souls used as the playthings of malevolent demons.
After developing a script with Friedkin that simply didn’t come to fruition, Blatty turned it into the novel, Legion, but ironically, when Morgan Creek wanted to film it – back to Exorcist III it went. However, studio interference had the movie chopped, changed, reshot and tinkered with, but after emerging from a tormented post production, the movie finally arrived in cinemas only to be unfairly dismissed and summarily forgotton.
While it seemed that the devil just couldn’t catch a break, years later, it seemed salvation was finally at hand.
Fifteen years after little Regan MacNeill managed to oust her unwanted guest, a rash of vicious murders have started being perpetrated around Georgetown that carry a disturbing, religious theme. After a young child is found crucified, blinded, beheaded and desecrated with the head of a religious statue, Lieutenant William Kinderman realises that the modus operandi matches that of the Gemini Killer, a murderer who bit the bullet fifteen years earlier thanks to the voltage of an electric chair.
Kinderman and his fellow officers are baffled, but their bafflement turns to frustration when a second murder involving a decapitated priest soon follows the first with alarming regularity and after consulting with his dear friend, Father Dyer and reminiscing about the long dead Damien Karras (one of the priests who exercised Regan), the gruff cop manages to link the killings back to the psychiatric ward at a local hospital and after a guided tour of the facility, makes a horrifying discovery. It seems that in the ward where they keep their most dangerous patients, sitting on a bed in room 11, is Damien Karras who seems very much alive – worse yet, the man insists to have no knowledge of who Karras is and instead claims to be James Venamun, the Gemini Killer reborn and it his he who has been committing these harrowing murders.
If this wasn’t disturbing enough, regardless of who this guy says he is, both Karras and Venamun have been dead for fifteen years, so what does this actually mean? As Kinderman digs deeper and tries to put the seemingly random clues together in order to come to an impossible truth, it seems like exorcism season is in the air once again as the killer’s motives draw a direct line back to the events of Regan’s salvation as he reveals a benefactor of horrifying origins.
Since its release in 1990, calls have gone out to restore the cuts made to The Exorcist III much in the same way it did for that other, Morgan Creek, horror production of the peroid, Clive Barker’s Nightbreed. However, while I’ve yet to witness Scream Factory’s partial reconstruction of the surviving footage – I have to admit, the theatrical cut of Blatty’s police procedural serial killer movie meets biblical horror flick actually isn’t that bad. As a matter of fact, it’s pretty fucking good as it proves to be a thoughtful, intelligent, trippy (there’s a doozy of a dream sequence) and – most of all – scary horror/thriller that shows that its director has as much control of the moving image as he does words on paper.
The secret is that even in his truncated version, Blatty has the common sense to let his movie breathe, soaking up the day to day sights of Georgetown while progressively drenching the neighbour in brooding menace with every downpour. Elsewhere, as almost a rebuttal to the gory excesses of the 80’s, Blatty keeps things classy as he can, relying on the measured explanations of the horrors this new version of the Gemini is inflicting on his victims. Watching the minute flashes of emotion on the troll-like features of George C. Scott as you hear what exactly what unspeakable acts had been unleashed on young Thomas Kintry proves to be far more unsettling than actually viewing his mangled corpse and the movie manages to sustain this more cerebral approach for virtually its entire running time.
Character wise, the choice of the author/director to focus on supporting characters from the original story is a genius one as we chiefly focus on the warm and genuinely moving quip-filled friendship of Kinderman (Scott replacing Lee J. Cobb) and Dyer (Ed Flanders subbing for William O’Malley) as they approach the anniversary of the death of their mutual friend, Damien Karras. Lightly sketched, but beautifully played with effortless, rat-a-tat dialogue, you’d truly believe these guys have been going to the movies together for fifteen years. However, as the investigation takes its heavy toll, it’s down to Kinderman to try and take stock of his sometimes volcanic emotions to push on to the end alone.
Thus we get a series of one-on-ones between Kinderman, Karras and the investing spirit of Gemini Killer staged in the murky surroundings of the latter’s cell that forms the backbone of the movie and prove to be as gripping as the bite of a twenty foot alligator. Remarkably, Blatty’s intended version never actually contained the return of Jason Miller, instead choosing to focus entirely on Karras having the visage of Brad Douriff, who predictably knocks it out the park with his patented intensity. However, while less screen time for Douriff is usually a bad thing, including Miller actually helps sell the concept far better as Kinderman alternates between seeing his friend and the Gemini Killer as his belief starts to shift.
While the powerhouse performances are undeniably knockout (Scott’s grandstanding rant about stink and filth is an over the top blessing), Exorcist III also knows that it’s striving to do justice to one of the most notorious movies ever made and while the brooding dread brilliantly realized with jarring cuts and sound levels set a little too high, Blatty also manages to smugly walk away with an infamous moment that’s not only now routinely recognized as one of the greatest jump scares ever filmed, but is one that beats filmmakers like M. Night Shyamalan and Ari Aster at their own game – let’s put it this way, hospitals and white sheets will never seen the same ever again…
While some of the studio’s meddling is still apparent (the titular exorcism feels noticably tacked on with Nicol Williamson’s priest literally having virtually no interaction with the rest of the cast), Exorcist III is still something of a forgotten gem is an intriguing example of how a faithful sequel needn’t be a carbon copy.
Underrated, underappreciated and under seen, Exorcist III is a movie that deserves worshipers that are legion in number.
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