EXORCIST 2: THE HERETIC (1977) [HCF GUILTY PLEASURES]

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
Directed by: John Boorman
Written by: John Boorman, Rospo Pallenberg, William Goodhart, William Peter Blatty
Starring: James Earl Jones, Linda Blair, Max von Sydow, Richard Burton

USA

AVAILABLE ON DVD

RUNNING TIME: 117 mins [director’s cut] /110 mins  [re-edited version]

Reviewed by: Dr Lenera

Traumatised by repressed memories of the time when she was possessed by a demon called Pazuzu, Regan McNeil becomes a patient at a place for troubled children.  It’s run by Dr. Gene Tuskin, who has invented a device that can hypnotise two people and link their minds together. Meanwhile Father Philip Lamont is ordered by his cardinal to investigate the death of Father Merrin, a priest who had died whilst performing an exorcism on Regan. Philip finds Regan while she;S using the mind device with Gene, and sees that Regan still lurks within her. Regan starts having dreams of flying in Africa and Philip sets off for Ethiopia to find out more….

I remember distinctly when I first watched Exorcist 2:The Heretic. I was about sixteen and had not long obtained and watched a bootleg video of The Exorcist, a film that, as we all know, was banned from home viewing for many years. Of course that movie blew me away, despite the fact that the copy was of very poor quality. I had read several times that its sequel [this was three or four years before the third movie in the series was made] was absolutely appalling. My stepdad had a book called The Golden Turkey Awards, and it had Exorcist 2 as the second worst film ever made [the worst was Plan Nine From Outer Space, which undoubtedly is awful but also happens to be loads of fun].  Reading the bit about Exorcist 2, it did seem that the movie was bad. I had to see it, and hired out the video. I was surprised to find that, not only was it not nearly as bad as that book and others had made out, it was also, in places, quite good. I’m certainly not going to make a claim for it as an unheralded masterpiece; it’s certainly something of a mess and doesn’t really work all the time. However, for me to even say it’s ‘quite good’ probably makes me sound insane. I’m sure my fellow reviewers on this website, who I think can’t stand the movie, probably think I am for saying that, but I don’t care. In my opinion Exorcist 2 deserves its place amidst the other three films in the series as a uniquely different and rather brave take on the premise, even if it’s somewhat separate from them – the third and fourth movies [both versions] totally ignored this one, even if the fourth one [in both versions] used the idea of an African boy being possessed.

When neither writer William Peter Blatty nor director William Friedkin wanted to do a sequel, Warner Bros had the idea of doing a really low budget film which would be about a priest interviewing people concerned with the exorcism in the first movie and qhich would flash back to unused footage. This notion was thankfully thrown away when playwright William Goodhart wrote a screenplay which made use of many of the ideas of Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, a Jesuit archaeologist who inspired the character of Father Merrin from the first film. William O’Malley’s Father Joseph Dyer was going to be the ‘hero’ but the actor was unavailable. Director John Boorman had turned down The Exorcist, calling it ‘repulsive’, but liked the ‘positive’ elements here and happily signed on. Goodhart then bailed out when Boorman’s usual collaborator Rospo Pallenberg was brought on by the director to help rewrite the script, which ended up being changed day to day. Linda Blair refused to wear the makeup she’d previously worn [this was eventually got around by using shots, some of them unused, from film number one]. Production was cancelled for a month when Boorman caught a fever, editor John Merritt quit, and some footage came out over-saturated causing reshoots. The premiere met with such a negative reaction that Boorman recut the 117 minute film down to a 110 minute version for general release. He deleted some scenes and parts of scenes, added a few shots from The Exorcist and a shot of gore, changed the beginning, changed the ending from a positive one to a slightly more negative one and used some different, unused music cues. Audiences and critics alike disliked the picture and it was a huge flop.

Does all this negative reaction mean that it has to automatically be a bad film? No! Straight away this has a different feel to The Exorcist; instead of that movie’s almost documentary realism in its build up to its horror, we have a more dreamlike feel, as if things are off-kilter straight immediately.  Much of the film’s first half is set in the unnamed psychiatric place for children, and it’s quite extraordinary, seemingly made out of steel and lots and lots of mirrors,which allow Boorman and his cinematographer William A. Fraker to play lots of eerie games with characters appearing in reflection, characters seemingly appearing ‘inside’ others and characters never seeming to be alone – there’s always someone that can be seen through a window or mirror in the background. There’s one superb scene where Regan, Gene and Philip are in the middle of the frame, a flashback shot of Merrin and Regan seems to appear around them and the possessed Regan in the old shot appears to touch Gene. The pace is very slow, but no slower than that of the previous movie, and though Regan seems to have certain powers, this is kept nicely low key. Soon we shift more and more to Africa, with lots of terrific sequences where the camera swoops over what seems to be almost a fairytale land, and indeed Ethiopia in this movie is depicted as an almost mythical place of lost cities, mystical medicine men, lots and lots of locusts, and a perpetual orange sky.

Yes, all this goes very far away from The Exorcist, and as the movie becomes a strange kind of adventure with Philip going on a quest, I can see why many people were disappointed and confused, but just because it’s different doesn’t immediately mean that it is crap, and there’s a great deal of imagination at work here, not to mention one of the best ‘blimey, it was a dream” segments ever.  When Philip is back in America and things move towards the climax, Regan’s increasing evil power is economically shown. Our protagonists are driving and they keep passing signs of deaths with ambulances, police and the like. The climax, set in Regan’s old house, is a little lame, and there’s some atrocious dialogue in this movie, such as this gem: Father Lamont, ”when the wings have brushed you, is there no hope when the wings have brushed you?”, Pazuzu, “No, when the wings have brushed you, you’re mine”. Pallenberg’s dialogue for Boorman’s movies was often like this in films and can almost work for films like Zardoz and Excalibur, but certainly doesn’t here, it’s just bizarre and sometimes funny.

The story is definitely a bit daft, it sends its hero to Africa and has him scaling mountains, climbing down gorges and walking on spikes only to be told that Good and Evil are fighting inside Regan, something he could have probably worked out for himself.  Now one of the most common criticisms of Exorcist 2 is of the editing – scenes suddenly end, seem to cut in half way through, really long scenes alternate with ten second ones etc. It seems to me to be a stylistic choice, an attempt to give the film an unusual feel, rather than carelessness. At times it’s almost avant garde, in the manner of Jean Luc-Godard. One thing the film certainly isn’t, is scary, which is probably the other major reason for its poor reception, but then I don’t think it even tries to be scary.  You have to admire Boorman’s gall for making his sequel to The Exorcist a metaphysical thriller with virtually no blood or swearing!

As he often was – especially in the second half of his career – Richard Burton, in a role that was offered to Jack Nicholson, Christopher Walken, Jon Voight and David Carradine, is obviously pissed during many of this scenes. Att times, he really looks glazed, but criticisms of his performance as being overly hammy aren’t entirely warranted to me. He acts the way many people would when faced with the stuff he encounters. As for Linda Blair, she’s okay but the script doesn’t really give her much to work with. After seeing the film, we don’t feel we know Regan any more than we did at the end of the first one. A real hero of Exorcist 2 is composer Ennio Morricone, who, as he often did in horror films he scored, uses very innovative and downright scary sounds and instrument combinations, here often with an element of African tribal music. By contrast, he also wrote a lovely theme for Regan, though it’s maybe overused towards the end. Exorcist 2 is a weird combination of very good and very poor, but I consider it certainly better than Exorcist 4:The Beginning and a more interesting [and note, I mean more interesting, rather than better] film than Exorcist 3. I hope that one day its reputation will improve and more people will be willing to succumb to its delights, because delights it certainly has!

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