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For some reason this last week I decided to watch again, after many years, these two sequels. Here are my impressions.

The Exorcist II: The Heretic.

Alright. I can understand the hatred. John Boorman had a very difficult task in at least equaling the original and failed. Still, you have to admire the ambition and the guts it took to make such a different film as the original. Richard Burton stars as a priest that for some reason is ordered to evaluate Regan, now a perfectly healthy teenager. The investigation leads him to Africa and a quest to find out more about Pazuzu, the demon responsible of the possession.

What works: The visuals. Boorman never disappoints in this aspect. We are treated to some amazing, highly stylized visuals of Africa: an adobe village, a church on the top of a rocky mountain, numerous locust-point-of-view aerial scenes. I also found very intriguing the ideas that Pazuzu might be attacking "healers" or future healers from different faiths (after all, he's a pre-Christian entity) and that Regan may have some important role later in life, although this last thing is just hinted.

What doesn't work: Pretty much everything. Boorman isn't trying to replicate the intensity of Friedkin's movie, that I can accept, but still the whole thing isn't scary at all, and that I can't accept. Then there's the acting. Teenage Linda Blair is painful to watch. When she's not trying to hard to look sweet or cute she's just plain bad. And Burton... he's in this one just for the paycheck, but you'd think an actor of his stature would at least put a brave face and try to keep his dignity intact. Well, he doesn't. And when the script calls for him to ham it up and hold his breath, he does without flinching. Can you imagine him falling prey to teenage Regan sexual advances? Or yelling to a bus driver in posessed voice? Well, all this he does, and the results are SNL worthy.

Then there's the general idiocy of the script. The priest praying to Pazuzu to obtain vital clues in his investigation? Pazuzu playing along? James Earl Jones as a pagan priest? And the climax in the Georgetown house, a too evident nod to the first movie, is just laugh-out-loud bad.

Legion: The exorcist III.

Luckily, there's still another sequel to "The Exorcist", and one that alone grants this thread a place in the "Good movies" board. William Peter Blatty, author of the novel that spawned the series was brought on board to write and direct, and he adapts another of his novels, also a loose sequel to "The exorcist". And the first thing you notice is what a great film director he is. Everything is wonderfully photographed, and he has an eye for visual composition that makes every frame inmediatelly distinctive... and slightly off, which certainly adds to the mood. If Friedkin opted for an unrefrained hyper-realism, Blatty aims for restraint, but for a restraint that is so unnatural that you always feel there's something lurking under the surface, and indeed it is. The script is also very clever. It follows the investigation of Kinderman, a veteran Georgetown detective (a terrific George C. Scott, in what probably was one of his last film appearences), who is after a serial killer with a fixation for religion and an almost supernatural ability.   

Don't take me wrong, as I said this is a very good movie, but it's not entirely without faults. The whole investigation angle, for instance, feels rather disjointed. We follow George C. Scott from murder scenes to interviews with the witnesses and so on, but we never fully grasp what theories he might be considering or we are allowed a general view of the whole affair. And at the beginning of the movie we get a glimpse of Kinderman's friendship with a priest, and their scenes together are a joy to watch, full of terrific acting and razor sharp dialogue. But then the priest's character just disappears and we're left just with Kinderman for the remainder of the film. Damn.

Still, this is a very worthy sequel, very well directed and with some amazingly scary little bits. And the way it connects with the events of the original film at the end... that's just terrific, you must watch it to fully apreciate it.   

I like your write-up on Exorcist III. Well done. The last time I saw it was when it was released in the theatre and your review pretty much matches my memory. You mentioned that we get to see elements of investigation but don't get to see any possible theories or a general view. Actually, that is probably closer to what real police work is. Detectives don't just jumpt to theories so quickly in real life like they do in the movies. But, then, they have to do that to make it a good movie. Real police work would usually make a very dull film.

As for Exorcist II, I have't seen it since I was a pubescent boy, so I remember liking it because I thought teenage Linda Blair was hot. I have no doubt it was as bad as you say.

I hate EXORCIST II.  Every 3 or 4 years I dig out the DVD and watch it again.  I want to like it, but it's such a disappointment. 

EXORCIST III isn't very good either, but it's much better than Part II.  Too bad Lee J. Cobb died . . . I thought he was perfect as Kinderman.  George C. Scott was pretty good in the role, but Cobb was better.

   Part 2 seemed confused and confusing and I have to admit I lost interest at some point. Plus, how scary is a monster named Pazoozoo? Not very terrifying.
  The best thing about part 3, in addition to ol George C., was the old lady doing the spider walk. That freaked me out.

Part III has one of the best scares I have ever seen. Of course I am talking about the hospital scene. When I saw it in the theater that one brief scene made the entire place jump.

Not surprisingly. A nice static shot following for like looked like minutes a nurse walking around, and then...  :buggedout:

It's my favourite scare from this movie.

I Actually Like THE EXORCIST II , But I Never Got Around To Seeing THE EXORCIST III

Exorcist II is a bad, bad movie.  To me, it seems like Boorman signed on to the project and then, suddenly, realized he had absolutely no idea how to make the movie.  So, he fell back on what helped make his career in the first place: "art".  Boorman's cluelessness about making a supernatural horror movie, plus the absolute travesty of a script (I'll eat my hat if that was anything but a first draft) equaled one of the all-time great cinema disasters.  It really is THAT bad.

Although I do love the part in the background of one scene where a little kid is rolling around in a hexagonal thing.  It just comes out of nowhere, it's so bizarre, and it completely upstages the foreground action to such an extent that I had to pause the movie I was laughing so hard.  I can't imagine what that must have been like to see in a theater.

I tried to watch Exorcist III a couple of times and I just can't get through it.  Whereas II was bad in that trainwreck sort of way, III is just ... boring.

For me, this is one of the top 10 worst (mainstream) movies of all time.  It's right up there with stuff like DUNE and WIRED.

(Cough, cough) I like "Dune", although I admit it doesn't make much sense unless you've read the book first. And that almost every introductory scene has a voiceover explaining what we just saw. Or that the acting is not exactly memorable, despite the big names. And that those people riding what suspiciously looks like giant cocks, pointing at their enemies and yelling random syllables in the big finale look very silly.

But if you ignore all those things, it's a pretty good movie.  :lookingup:

Hey, Dune is great.

I really liked Part III. It pretty much stayed true to the Legion book on which it was based. Part II is amazingly bad. It'd be a stretch calling it a horror movie. "Lower your tone, Regan" hehe. The only redeeming factor: a HOT teenage Linda Blair.  :buggedout:

I remember seeing DUNE in the theater and thinking to myself, "This is boring, my ass is killing me, is this movie ever gonna end?????"

Exorcist II is trash.  Pure and absolute trash.  I have no idea what the hell John Boorman was thinking while making it.

Exorcist III is an overlooked classic.  That film is superb from beginning to end.  Its atmospheric, its haunting....and that scene with the nurse.....  I dare any of you to find a better scare than that.  Everytime I watch it, I still jump despite knowing it's coming.  Love the film, love George C Scott's acting in it, and I love the script.  One of my all time favorites.

George C Scott is a distant cousin of mine, so I always support family.  :teddyr: