THE EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC @ 45

The Exorcist was released when the '70s were three years in and this sequel came out when there were three years to go. Between the two points the triumph of New Hollywood had fulfilled its early promises, brought auteurism into a mainstream the richer for it. So, while the first one was less considered for its directorial by-line than its sequel. The reason to bring this up is that William Friedkin's dud-free '70s was declared in retrospect while the hit and miss John Boorman got a poster credit over the title. And yet it's the one that is so commonly reviled as garbage that it has come to form a void between the first and the heavily compromised but well regarded Exorcist III (directed by the writer of the source novel)

Richard Burton plays Father Lamont who is introduced confronting a demon in possession of a local woman considered by her village to be a healer. It spooks him and links him to the first film's Father Merrin whose case he gets to investigate by order of a cardinal who wants Lamont to clear Merrin's name of the suspicion of heresy and possible satanism. Really? Ok, off we go to New York where Fr Lamont catches up with a teenage Regan whose being treated by Nurse Ratchet in a mental health centre that is all glass panes and perspective-challenging angles which is just the place you want to be when your psyche is feeling a little vulnerable. Ok, not Nurse Ratchet, just Louise Fletcher who has mind-meld throb machine to tune a pair of scones into unison. Cue overlay of scenes of the younger Regan as the divil from the first one. But, just like the girl at the beginning, Regan finds that the other side of a touch of Satan is the power of healing. She brings an autistic patient into smooth eloquence just by going into the room and chewin' the fat. And --

Ok, you get the idea. This is an attempted expansion of the themes in the first one toward the realm of the mystical. And just as Lucio Fulci took the religion-stripped Dawn of the Dead to make his sneaky sequel Zombie that poured all that religion back in because it was easier that way, so John Boorman took the high tension, anti-gothic The Exorcist of William Friedkin and pumped all the ooky booky bullshit in where it hadn't been. Boorman who rightly impressed with Point Blank and Deliverance also drew winces of pure yuck with goofy garbage like Zardoz. He would, after Ex2 go on to make the entertaining but toxically silly Excalibur. The problem is not all his but this execution which brought the cinema walls down with screaming laughter where the first just had the screams is never helped by his diveting from the hard realist tension of the first (which makes the unreality of it scarier) to find an ecstasy of  divine bubblegum.

Just as culpable, here, was what happened in those four years that separated the first from the second. On the one hand while noir became as heavy as Taxi Driver and satire as Swiftian as Network, horror reinvested in ghouls 'n' beasties. The realist look and feel that Friedkin gave the genre with The Exorcist was maintained but the tales just went back to the basics, a kind of theatre restaurant without the jokes. Now, I'll admit to loving fare like Carrie or The Omen but when their hokey fenokey credulity for magic encourages Boorman to make a horror sequel that tries to be deeper than it should be things get unsustainable. Bigger budget, less risk, more piffle. Perhaps the best that can be said for the excesses of The Exorcist II is that necessitated the lean and relentlessly mean Halloween the year after, made for what they paid the extras in Ex2 and celebrated for evermore as a milestone.

I tend to be easy on sequels. They can be fun, especially when you dive in young and satiate with massive doses of world building and all the best things in cinema. But there are some that don't play nicely and this is one. It doesn't play nicely because it is conceived and executed aloof from its genre. Friedkin didn't do that, he wanted it new but he wanted it horror; Boorman seems to think he can rescue the story from all that gutter genre stuff but then doesn't seem to feel it when he falls flat on his face in the attempt. I'm ranting. I think I wanted to be surprised and find some value that the memory of the silliness masked. What I found was like a prototype of the kind of thing that currently goes under the bullshit term elevated horror. I cannot say less than that.