30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT - Night 8: EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977)

It's easy to imagine a potential sequel to The Exorcist taking the route of, say, Halloween II or countless manufactured sequels to successful horror films-turned-franchises.  Usually when a sequel is conceived, the producers demand more of the same: if it worked the first time, do it again.

The most comforting thing about Exorcist II: The Heretic is that it is not that.  After talks between the studio, writer William Peter Blatty, and director William Friedkin hit a stalemate, the studio brought in John Boorman to take the reins.  Boorman might have seemed like the natural choice, since his handling of brutal, realistic horror in Deliverance was not far off from Friedkin's approach to the first film.

Deliverance was so good that it must have been easy to ignore that Boorman at that point had also made Zardoz, the sublimely wacky dystopian sci-fi film in which a be-speedo'd Sean Connery drove a giant floating head.  That, unfortunately, appears to have been the mode Boorman was in when making Exorcist II.  It's a mess of overwrought symbolism and psychological mumbo-jumbo, ditching the grounded terror of the original for a loop-de-loop through Catholicland.  It's something.  It's not a good film, but it certainly is something.

We begin in a distant jungly part of South America, where Fr. Philip Lamont (Richard Burton) is performing an exorcism that doesn't go so well.  Right away the movie approaches silliness: while in the original film exorcism was a rare occurrence, so much so that there appeared to be really only one exorcist in the Church, here they're the norm.  Exorcist II spends precious little time in the real world, and thus is never scary in any believable way.

Wait--I forgot.  The movie jumps the silly shark even before the first scene.  Right around the time the opening credits get to Ennio Morricone as composer, atmospheric music swells, drums kick in and we hear a woman doing her best hyena impression.  Oh well: with 510 credits, I guess you don't hit the bulls-eye at every one.

Lamont is informed by The Cardinal (Paul Henreid) that the Church is considering the posthumous excommunication of Fr. Merrin (Max von Sydow), the eponymous exorcist of the first film, under the ludicrous premise that since he died at the hands of a demon, he may have been a Satanist at the time of death.  Lamont is dispatched to New York to question Regan (Linda Blair), the formerly possessed little girl, about just what happened that fateful night.

Then it gets weird.  Since Regan can't remember anything about her possession, her psychiatrist Dr. Tuskin (Louise Fletcher) hooks her up to a "synchronizer," which acts as a sort of dual-hypnosis machine, in which both doctor and patient can experience what's going on in the patient's head.  Dr. Tuskin, Regan, and Fr. Lamont hook up to the synchronizer to see if they can replay the events that happened just before Fr. Merrin's death.

Ho boy.  You can see that the unbending reality of the first film is gone.  What follows is a film that, however bad, I've never seen before.  The synchronizer scene, silly as it is, is mesmerizing in its loopiness.  Lamont further investigates Merrin's past, notably flashbacks of one exorcism he performed in Africa, which paves the way for the aforementioned drum-and-hyena score.  James Earl Jones turns up as a now-grown boy who survived an exorcism, in a scene that must be seen to be believed.

Meanwhile, Regan either has a relapse of her possession, or she gains angelic power.  It's hard to tell which.  There's a scene in which she convinces a young autistic girl (Dana Plato--yep, Dana Plato) to speak for the first time, which deserves a special place in film history alongside Evel Knievel inspiring a disabled kid to drop his crutches.


She also exhibits psychic powers, like when she draws a picture of Lamont surrounded by fire, which predicts a hospital scene in which Lamont tries to put out a flaming cardboard box with a wooden crutch.

The climax attempts to recreate the bed-thumping Bible-spewing exorcism from the first film, but it seems out of place in Boorman's film, which seems to want to head in a different path.  Boorman dives headfirst into the mythology of the demonic possession, caring less about the real-world characters and more about the demon itself. (Its name, by the way, is Pazuzu.)  Regan is the least interesting character in her own movie.

As for Burton, all that Shakespearean training did nothing to prepare him for lines like "Your machine has proved scientifically that there's an ancient demon locked within her." The dialogue in William Goodhart's monumentally goofy screenplay would sound better uttered by Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee than by the likes of Burton, Fletcher, Henreid, Jones, or any of its parade of Oscar-winners and acclaimed actors (Ned Beatty has a small role as well).  Oddly, the actor who fares best is Kitty Winn, who played Sharon, the live-in from the first film, and returns here in a role what was semi-obviously meant to be filled by Ellen Burstyn.

Exorcist II goes to so many odd places that I almost want to recommend it.  Somehow Boorman managed to out-Zardoz Zardoz and make one of the downright wackiest films ever made.  It's a film with clear intelligence behind it, and a respectable auteur with grand ambitions.  It's also completely ridiculous.

**** out of ****

No, no.  Mustn't get carried away.  In the real world:

* 1/2 out of ****