Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
John Boorman
"Satan has become an embarrassment to our progressive views."
Exorcist II: The Heretic is a cursed film, and I mean that in the worst way possible. It is the kind of film that takes two hours to tell 25 minutes worth of story, introducing and eliminating characters seemingly at random (and jumbling up their motivations to suit the particular needs of each individual scene), and following narrative threads with the attention span of a toddler. This may be too generous a criticism, because there is no overall narrative to Exorcist II, at least not one that a rational human being can parse. Sure there's a story; in fact there's about a dozen of them. Do they go anywhere? No. Are they soundly constructed? Oh my no. Do we at least have fun along the way? Absolutely not.
Originally, the sequel to The Exorcist was supposed to be a quick and dirty rehash of the first film, utilizing scenes and angles that were cut from the theatrical release with about 20 minutes of new interstitial stuff to fill in the gaps, sort of like The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular. The story was going to involve a priest (maybe also played by a very tired and hungover Richard Burton) tasked with investigating the circumstances of the Regan exorcism and the death of two priests. He would speak with characters from the first film, and we'd get flashbacks with some unseen footage. Their goal was to crap out a sequel as quickly and as cheaply as possible. It would have been a lazy cash-in.
But when most of the important actors and creators from the first film ran screaming from the room when offered bit parts in the sequel, John Boorman (director of Zardoz) stepped up to the plate and offered to take on the task himself. He was excited by the prospect of making a film about the following topics: paranormal psychology, demon possession, hypnosis, dreams, the battle between good and evil, ancient Christian traditions, Catholicism, family, the bonds between mother and daughter, mystic healing, locusts, agricultural science, Satanism, the history of Father Merrin, and witchdoctors. And all of this in under 2 hours and with a paltry $14 million budget!
Obviously it's a mess, but its worst sin is that it's a boring mess. There are entire stretches of the film where nothing happens. And I genuinely mean nothing. Scenes regularly end abruptly and cut to a jumbo jet either taking off or landing for no purpose, and we linger on it for a while. We watch the landing gear go down. We watch the landing gear go up. We watch the flaps go up. We watch the flaps go down. It's maddening.
And when things aren't boring, they're just painfully awkward. There's a sequence where Richard Burton is climbing a mountain to get to some secluded Ethiopian Orthodox church, but it's cut together with Regan doing just the most embarrassing tap dance routine ever. The point of the scene is to show that they're still psychically linked, even on the other side of the globe from each other, but it comes off as bizarre rather than tense.
Characters will find and lose motivation in the course of 15 minutes (one character goes from good to evil to good again all within the same scene, and for no explicable reason). Scenes that seem possibly important refuse to go anywhere at all. Here's two good examples: at one point Regan sleepwalks and almost falls off the balcony of her Manhattan penthouse apartment, but this terrifying spell is never discussed again, nor does her sleepwalking ever reappear. In another scene, as Regan's psychiatrist (played by Louise Fletcher, aka Nurse Ratched) flies from New York to D.C., her plane suddenly begins to nosedive into a crash. Thirty seconds later, we cut back and the plane is flying normally, and nobody seems any worse for wear. Scenes in this film are simply faint shadows that exist for a moment and then fade away into nothingness.
There's also a tremendous amount of pseudoscientific nonsense here, even beyond the central conceit of "demonic possession is an actual thing." Within the first 20 minutes we're treated to a ponderously long, boring, and outright annoying scene of Louise Fletcher's Synchronizer Technique. This involves two subjects wearing a rubber strap around their heads with four measly electrodes wired to it. The subjects then stare at a blinking light that speeds up and slows down depending on how "deep" into their own subconscious they are (or whatever), and somehow this allows two people to become psychically connected. It's the kind of dopey pop science nonsense that Michael Crichton would write after being kicked in the head by a mule.
After 10 minutes of blinking lights and nothing happening, we suddenly get a scene with good human Regan and evil Pazuzu Regan literally slap fighting over Louise Fletcher's beating heart. Why? Who knows!
Wow! How stupid!
This nascent technological story line never turns into much, other than a way to psychically link Regan with Richard Burton's priest character, so that he can also be possessed by Pazuzu (or something) and so that she can have something to do in the rest of the movie. I will say, however, it does lead to one of the funniest abandoned plot points of the film. Somewhere in the third act, Regan and the priest meet up at the natural history museum to talk about…I don't know…demons maybe, and Richard Burton tells her that some in the church want all of our minds to coalesce into one big singularity of consciousness. He spills the beans on some fucked up Catholic Human Singularity Project, and Regan's response is basically, "Oh, neat. When's that happening?" like she wants to add it to her calendar. And then it's never mentioned again!
There's a brief modicum of hope when James Earl Jones shows up late in the movie, because his introduction is of him dressed like a giant locust witchdoctor, spitting a leopard out of his mouth to scare off Pazuzu. But it turns out he's actually just a scientist working on a way to stop locusts from eating crops in Africa, and does not actually have magic powers, nor is he a witchdoctor. Or maybe he is (did I mention the movie isn't clear?) Regardless, once his scene is over, he's forgotten about forever. Just like everything else in Exorcist II: The Heretic.
It's possible that there's some next level Mulholland Drive style liminal state shit happening here that I'm just not wrapping my head around, but I know for a fact that when I watch Mulholland Drive, I'm not bored to fucking tears waiting for something interesting to happen.
Nothing more to say here. There's no more plot to wrap up. This movie is dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. You should never see it, and may God have mercy on its soul.
The trailer is kind of a banger, though:
Ennio Morricone's soundtrack also kind of rips, but it's shamefully wasted.
REVIEW: A wildly intoxicated Richard Burton stepping on my face forever
HOW I WATCHED IT: Shamefully purchased on Amazon Prime for $3
BEVERAGE: Diet root beer. An appropriately disappointing drink.
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