1977 - EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, very strange sequel to The Exorcist

You have to give credit to the executives at Warner Brothers who green lite this sequel to The Exorcist. They could have easily went for the quick cash grab and knocked out a film that would have rehashed all of the violent and vomit scenes from the first film.  Warner Brothers sparred no expense with this film. A top notch director, an all star cast as it were, Ennio Morricone scored the film and the production was clearly an expensive one.

John Boorman the director was an interesting choice and signaled that the studio was looking for something a little more classy then some crappy horror movie.  The problem with Boorman was that while he was a great filmmaker he also had a tendency to go very "weird" on some of his films.  His previous film had been the very strange science fiction film Zardoz, a big warning sign if there ever was one.

Exorcist II:  The Heretic went for some high class casting.  Richard Burton played a priest investigating the first exorcism.  Burton was a fine actor but he brought a lot of baggage to his part with his somewhat hammy performance.  Louise Fletcher had won awards for her performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but in contrast to Burton she really underplayed her part to the point that she almost seemed nonexistent in the film.  Then there was the problem of Linda Blair.  Hired at age 14 to play Regan the now unpossessed child. Blair was 18 years old and was by necessity the linchpin of Exorcist II.  However her performance really seemed like amateur hour at times almost cringe worthy.  The filmed was going to rise or fall on her and unfortunately it fell. She was also stuck with some of the worst dialog in the film and there is a lot of bad dialog in this film.

Apparently during the filming John Boorman struggled with the story and never seemed to get a handle on it.  Was it going to be a horror film or a cerebral examination of good vs evil?  Clearly this was never resolved as the film jumps between impressively staged and photographed scenes and some of the laziest and most contrived plotting that would have put a 40's Universal horror movie to shame.

 

Exorcist II: The Heretic should probably be put in the interesting failure category of films. It's got good stuff in it but overall the film is a mess.  Maybe they should have stuck with the quick sequel cash grab approach.

The film was written by  William Goodhart but was extensively rewritten during filming by John Boorman.  The film exists in two versions, a theatrical cut and a shorter version that Boorman reedited in an attempt to salvage the really disastrous reviews the film received from the critics. I viewed the 117 minute version.