The Exorcist is continuously hailed as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. It was, I believe, the first horror movie to be a serious contender for Best Picture. Its status as one of the great films in cinema is secure. Exorcist II: The Heretic, conversely, is continuously hailed as one of the worst sequels ever made. Less a "what were they thinking" film and more a "are they quite literally insane" film, Exorcist II: The Heretic is at times an unintentional comedy, at other times flat-out bonkers.
It has been two years since the events in The Exorcist. Renegade and troubled Father Philip Lamont (Richard Burton) has been tasked by a Vatican cardinal (Paul Henreid) to investigate the late Father Merrin (Max von Sydow). Was he a heretic for his views on exorcism? Was he a hero for those same beliefs? It is time to find out and establish the truth once and for all. To do that, Father Lamont must go to talk, informally, to Regan McNeil (Linda Blair). Regan has no memories of her possession, though she is aware of it. Her therapist, Dr. Gene Tuskin (Louise Fletcher) is not a believer in evil and demonic possession. She does want to help Regan, so that means getting her under deep hypnosis.
Under hypnosis, Regan and Tuskin and later Regan and Lamont delve deep into Regan's mind. The demon Pazuzu, rather than being gone, is very much around. What is his hold on Regan? What of his hold of African boy Kokumo, who has fought against Pazuzu in the past? Lamont defies the Vatican's orders to stop the investigation and goes to seek out the adult Kokumo (James Earl Jones), who is now a scientist fighting the locust plague. Locust and Pazuzu are connected, as are Pazuzu and Regan. It becomes an ultimate battle between Pazuzu and Lamont for Regan, with Dr. Tuskin and Regan's caretaker Sharon (Kitty Winn) as collateral damage. Not all will survive the ultimate battle.
I think my summation of Exorcist II: The Heretic is probably more concise than the movie itself. A lot of Exorcist II does not make any sense. For example, Regan gives Father Lamont a surprisingly well-drawn image of him surrounded by flames. Out of this, Father Lamont immediately knows that Dr. Tuskin's psychiatric center is going to go up in flames. While it does, I cannot for the life of me figure out how he made that connection.
This plot point seems to be taken from, unintentionally or not, The Omen, where the photographer took pictures that predicted someone's death.
Everything involving the locust seemed to be equally oddball to silly. This starts from when Lamont goes to darkest Africa to find Kokumo. He first stops at a convent where Lamont attempts to hide his vocation by telling the pilot Edwards (Ned Beatty) that he is an archaeologist. Edwards immediately picks up that he is a priest. How? That's not important. We take a long time to get to Kokumo, with scenes involving Ethiopian Christians that make them look like voodoo practicioners. To be fair, the Ethiopians seem to have fun humiliating the white priest by taking him to "Kokumo" who ends up being a prostitute.
Another part is when Regan, under if not possession at least psychological influence, comes close to falling off the roof of her penthouse home. It already looks strange that Regan, despite being fourteen years old, seems to live alone (the explanation as to why her mother is never around a ridiculously weak one). After surviving this rather horrifying experience, Sharon comes upon Regan on the penthouse roof, feeding the pigeons and surprisingly calm. OK, I can give a little leeway that maybe she does not remember being possessed or subconsciously influenced. How, however, does she not remember almost falling to her death?
Exorcist II seems to almost delight in not making sense. I genuinely do not know if director John Boorman or screenwriter William Goodhart intended to make a comedy. However, that is what they got. How else to explain the unintentional hilarity of "Pazuzu vs. Kokumo"? These two names, bouncing off each other with abandon, make things sound funny.
One of the most flat-out idiotic parts of Exorcist II is what is meant to be the great dramatic conclusion. In this section, everyone goes to the old Washington house where Regan's possession had taken place. Even with Lamont initially succumbing to the lusty temptations of Regan's double, how could they or anyone else in the neighborhood not hear the fiery crash that Tuskin and Sharon were in as they literally crashed into the house? Sharon, who for reasons I don't know called Regan a "stupid bitch", seemed fine with leaving Tuskin trapped in the car. Neither of them seemed concerned that the poor cab driver was killed. Tuskin was not too perturbed that Sharon literally went up in flames.
It is all very strange, very illogical.
Exorcist II: The Heretic is filled with such, shall I say, curious acting that it makes thing watchable only in the same way that a car wreck is watchable. Richard Burton starts out all right. As the film went on however, he started looking more crazed, figuring that he is something so looney that even he couldn't go over-the-top. As he shouted, "FLAMES! FLAMES!" when he saw the picture Regan had drawn, I thought Burton might genuinely have been drunk. Burton has an almost unhinged intensity, as if the crazier he looks the more realistic he thinks it all is. By the end, one is simply not sure if Burton even knows or cares about what is going on. He might have been yelling out "Pizazz" for "Pazuzu" for all he knew.
Louise Fletcher is quite quiet in Exorcist II: The Heretic. It is as if she thought that if she kept still and soft, no one would notice that she was in Exorcist II: The Heretic. I felt for Jones, who was made to dress up in this faux-native African garb when Father Lamont first meets him. To his credit, he did much better when he played the adult Kokumo, cooly dismissing the idea that he had once been possessed by Pazuzu.
I won't beat up on Blair, who was seventeen to eighteen at the time. She did her best with a script that had her tell an autistic girl, "I was possessed by a demon". The fact that Blair didn't burst out laughing at such a ridiculous thing to say is a credit to her. Ned Beatty could have been cut entirely and added nothing to things. I figure he was just glad to have a job that probably paid him well and may have sent him on location to Africa. Perhaps the same can be said for Henreid in his final role. I did not even know that he was in Exorcist II: The Heretic. My sense is that he too does not want you to know that he was in Exorcist II: The Heretic.
Exorcist II: The Heretic is also cursed with bad production design where the African village looks like a soundstage. It also has something vaguely pretentious and bizarre in its African sequences, full of locust flying straight at us and looking terrible in more ways than one. The sweeping camera work Exorcist II tries for here almost makes you nauseous.
Exorcist II: The Heretic is, to be fair, not the disaster that I was led to believe. It is a bad film. It is a bad film in every way imaginable: poorly acted, nonsensical, at time unintentionally hilarious. It is not even a "so bad it's good" film. Despite this, I simply cannot find it in my heart to hate on it as much as everyone else seems to.
Exorcist II: The Heretic is like seeing what a movie on acid would look like.
THE EXORCIST FILMS
Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist
The Exorcist: Believer
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