Things wouldn’t be complete this season if we didn’t talk one slightly infamous movie. The original Exorcist, soon to be turning fifty years old, still remains a defining movie of the genre—being shocking and visceral for the time, and still enjoyable and all kinds of quotable now. It certainly helped that it had some great cinematography and performances the likes of the legendary Max von Sydow. A few years later, the inevitable sequel occurred, and was handed over to John Boorman, whose filmography has ranged from Oscar-nominated to utterly baffling. Let’s see where Exorcist II: The Heretic lies…
Our character of focus is this time Father Philip Lamont, played by Richard Burton, whose default expression through the film is a borderline hilarious fixed stoicism, sometimes broken by very understandable confusion. Lamont is tasked with investigating von Sydow’s character Merrin from the previous film, now posthumously accused of heresy for pretty hazy reasons. The actual hero priest from last time, Jason Miller’s Father Karras, is hardly mentioned, because Boorman simply couldn’t be bothered I guess.
Anyway, Lamont decides to follow up on possession victim Regan, played again by an older Linda Blair, who is undergoing therapy at an utterly bizarre psychiatric ward overseen by Dr. Tuskin (Loiuse Fletcher, aka Nurse Ratchet from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest!). Not only is this ward obsessed with making every wall a transparent window, it’s also invented psychic dream-sharing machines—getting in there before Christopher Nolan did, I guess. This is quickly glossed over so we can get into the first of many, many trippy sequences involving very blunt visual metaphors, and not long after that comes the first of many, many hilariously stupid moments where Lamont tries to extinguish a fire with a wooden crutch. I can only imagine how he’d handle an oil spill.
Now, how does the plot proceed after that? I’m honestly at a loss as to how to describe it. The film is like an art student trying to simultaneously imitate Jodorowsky and Lynch after banging their head on a pot of paint, but as far as I can tell, Lamont is drawn to a previous possession victim in Africa (played by James Earl Jones, who shows up wearing, of all the damn things, a very silly locust costumes). There are lots and lots of locusts involved—implied, I guess, to be manifestations of the villainous demon, who here is named Pazuzu. They repeat it often enough that it becomes very apparent why they didn’t name the demon in the first film.
But even the plot in Africa barely seems to pay off, aside from it turning out that Jones’ character is not in fact a witch doctor, but a modern scientist—I guess it’s supposed to signify the latent racism of Lamont’s character? Erm, maybe? Either way, do you happen to enjoy meandering, circular plots that feel like they go absolutely nowhere until the end? Well you’re in luck! This movie is absolutely tailor made for you! It’s not even two hours long, but feels like four, so you’ll get your money’s worth also!
Still, just every one in a while, there is a glimmer of something vaguely interesting that tricks you into thinking that something is happening. There seems to be a schism between Lamont and the church, but Burton seems so unsure as to what if any emotion he’s meant to bring that it doesn’t matter. Regan has some sort of psychic link that may or may not be because of the demon, but it may be because she is destined to be a ‘good locust’, and there’s all sorts of blabbering about locust wings and being brushed by them and oh dear god it gives me a headache to even think about.
Does it sound like it all makes no sense whatsoever? Well it’s only because it doesn’t. I’ll grant the ending sequence is entertaining, involving an entire house being torn off its foundations. But you’ll be left as Burton is through most of the film—utterly stupefied, unsure as to what you were even just looking at, and probably soon to grab something suitably strong?
All in all? Avoid contact with this film. The movie will confuse you. The movie will leave you feeling agonized. It will mix in occasional moments of morbid fascination with its bafflement. I would cast it into the depths of hell by pentagrammic portal, but I know that hell would only spit it back out at me, and then probably proceed to litigate me for psychological damages...
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