Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

“I was possessed by a demon. Oh, it’s okay, he’s gone.” – Regan MacNeil

Sometimes, I blunder – and this is one of them.

In fact, this is a spectacular one.

Back when I was making my selection for this year’s Shocktober, I thought that kicking off with the original Exorcist, which is pretty much universally acclaimed as the greatest horror film ever made, was inspired – and then, follow that up with the sequel, which I admit I had never seen. All sounds great, right?

Except, what I didn’t know until I screened it, was that the sequel is universally reviled as one of the worst films ever made. When I say one of the worst films, I’ll clarify by pointing out that I love really bad B movies like Plan Nine from Outer Space, because bad as they are – they’re entertaining.

This really isn’t entertaining on any level, other than a morbid curiosity to see how much worse it can possibly get. In fact, it’s so bad that director John Boorman should’ve been physically restrained from ever entering a film studio again. There is one quick scene which is pretty good, more on that later, but the rest is hard to watch for several reasons.

The script is truly awful – four years have elapsed since the events of The Exorcist. Regan (Linda Blair) is now 16 and is still undergoing monitoring by a psychiatrist despite claiming to have no memory of her demonic possession. Her psychiatrist, Dr Tuskin (Louise Fletcher) believes her memories are repressed.

Naturally, there HAS to be a priest struggling with his faith involved somewhere, this time it’s Father Lamont, played by Richard Burton – a man whose acting skill extends as far as brooding, but that’s about all he has in his repertoire. And brooding is about all he does in this film, though doubtless his status as a Hollywood legend was intended to bring some gravitas to this lacklustre waste of celluloid. He’s incidentally questioning his faith because in a previous exorcism, a lit candle fell on the dress the possessed girl was wearing, it caught light and she died. (I may well be going to hell myself because I thought that scene was hilarious.) Also, the Catholic Church want him to basically shut up about demonic possessions because in the modern day and age, they find the whole subject a bit embarrassing. So, even though the Church is considering heresy charges against him, they still want Lamont to investigate the death of Father Merrin four years earlier, in the first film.

To do this, he attends a session with Regan and Tuskin, where Regan is hypnotised to access those memories, and gain an insight into what actually happened. From then on, it’s a jumbled mess of swarms of locusts, flashbacks and needless expositions to flesh out the motivations of what happened four years earlier, the demon Pazuzu attacking people with psychic healing powers and Burton’s brooding reaching unparalleled levels of intensity.

The one good scene I mentioned has the possessed face of Regan superimposed over her normal face, as her possessed form resurfaces momentarily while under hypnosis. At that point, I thought there was hope for the movie, but there really wasn’t. The bad points outweigh the good.

For example, apart from the one-note performance by Burton, Linda Blair seems to have completely forgotten how to act since the first film, in which she made such a huge impression. It’s as much of a phoned in performance as that of Richard Burton’s, except Burton seems bored throughout. Pazuzu’s appearance as a huge swarm of locusts over the Capitol in Washington seems to have gone un-noticed by everybody. There’s a final showdown in the Georgetown, Washington house where the original film took place, which includes a car crashing into the building and again, nobody seems to notice for several minutes – in a residential area.

But the worst of it, I think, is the fact that this film is a cheap cash grab which dilutes the impact of the original. It’s wholly unnecessary and is actually annoying to watch. It’s completely devoid of any real horror or threat. It seems that the producers felt a need to rationalise the irrational by giving the demon who possessed Regan in the first place a motive. This plainly doesn’t work, as the original’s impact is that the possession was seemingly random – a wholly innocent little girl caught up in an ancient and unspeakable evil, the implication being that it could literally happen to anyone – even in this day and age. But adding the condition that the demon ONLY targets psychic healers tears that subliminal terror to shreds.

Quite rightly, the reception the film received on its release was deservedly hostile, one of the most vociferous critics was William Friedkin, the director of the original who said;

“I was at Technicolor and a guy said 'We just finished a print of Exorcist II, do you wanna have a look at it?' And I looked at half an hour of it and I thought it was as bad as seeing a traffic accident in the street. It was horrible. It's just a stupid mess made by a dumb guy – John Boorman by name, somebody who should be nameless, but in this case should be named. Scurrilous. A horrible picture".

As to the how and the why a film this just plain terrible was made, I’ll quote from an interview with director John Boorman in 2005;

“It all comes down to audience expectations. The film that I made, I saw as a kind of riposte to the ugliness and darkness of The Exorcist – I wanted a film about journeys that was positive, about good, essentially. And I think that audiences, in hindsight, were right. I denied them what they wanted and they were pissed off about it – quite rightly, I knew I wasn't giving them what they wanted and it was a really foolish choice. The film itself, I think, is an interesting one – there's some good work in it – but when they came to me with it, I told John Calley, who was running Warner Bros. then, that I didn't want it. "Look", I said, "I have daughters, I don't want to make a film about torturing a child", which is how I saw the original film. But then I read a three-page treatment for a sequel written by a man named William Goodhart and I was really intrigued by it because it was about goodness. I saw it then as a chance to film a riposte to the first picture. But it had one of the most disastrous openings ever – there were riots! And we recut the actual prints in the theatres, about six a day, but it didn't help of course and I couldn't bear to talk about it, or look at it, for years.”

At this point, I can only hope the third in the original trilogy is better. My thoughts on that one will be published in a few days.

You might want to wash the acrid taste of this one out of your mouth by listening to the Piercing the Veil Shocktober Special, available for play and download here.