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.

1967 - POINT BLANK, excellent crime thriller from Lee Marvin and John Boorman

Donald Westlake's cool criminal character who is only known by his last name "Walker," is featured in several films, The Split, The Outfit, and Payback.  Probably the best film based on the Walker character is British director John Boorman's Point Blank.   This was Boorman's first American film and he brought and outsider's view to Southern California and took what could have been a conventional story of a criminal's revenge against a crime syndicate and filmed it incorporating flashbacks and strange dream like sequences.

Lee Marvin was perfect casting for the character of Walker who during a robbery is betrayed by his best friend Mel Reese played by John Vernon and his wife Lynne Walker played by Canadian actor Sharon Acker.  As Walker works his way up the crime syndicate that Reese is now a part of,  he is assisted by Angie Dickinson who is pretty good as Acker's sister in law.  Mention should also be made of Keenan Wynn as a mysterious character named "Yost," who provides Walker information by the syndicate.

 

John Boorman was always a highly individualist film director.  It's amazing he made as many films as he did because Boorman liked to push the narratives of films in unusual storytelling ways.  The Emerald Forest, Zardoz, The Exorcist II: The Heretic to name a few are very odd films.  Boorman had some decent commercial success with Deliverance, Excalibur and the autobiographical Hope and Glory which probably kept him in the movie making game during his career.

 

Point Blank was also a very successful film financially and is now recognized as one of the best films of the 1970's.

The screenplay was by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse and Rafe Newhouse.  The running time is 92 minutes.

1985 - THE EMERALD FOREST, an interesting blend of many genre films.

 I can't even begin to guess what the director John Boorman had to deal with filming in the Amazon Jungle.  The film is a mix of many different films, The Searchers, Deliverance, some sort of ecological statement and finally a family drama.  The film ends up leading to a scene cribbed from the ending of another film Rolling Thunder.

Could a talented filmmaker like John Boorman pull it off?  Many critics thought so although a few found it a ponderous mess.

 

I thought the film was very good.  Say what you want about John Boorman but the guy always strives to tell a story that certainly isn't in any sense conventional.  At times this got him in trouble, witness Zardoz and Exorcist II:  The Heretic.

 

 The film was written by Boorman's long time associate Rospo Pallenberg and runs 114 minutes.

1968 - HELL IN THE PACIFIC, disappointing sort of war film from John Boorman.

During World War II, a Japanese soldier and an American pilot are stranded together on a pacific island.  At first they try to kill each other, or at least I think they are trying to kill each other. They seem to yell and chase each other around a whole lot. At one point they capture and tie each other up to a post and they take turns forcing the other one to walk up and down the beach in some sort of Christ like "Stations of the Cross" thing (it's very symbolic). Eventually they decide to work together to build a raft and escape from the island, because it's all about that brotherhood thing and working together is good, fighting with each other is not good.

After lots of artistic raft floating on the Pacific Ocean camera shots, they reach yet another island where they find the remains of a military base and finally they get cleaned up (they were looking mighty stinky). They find some booze get drunk and start arguing, in the distance you can hear explosions. Suddenly the building blows up and that's the end of the movie. But wait...you can go to the alternate ending on the DVD to see Boorman's original ending which is...the two of them get mad at each other and just walk away. What ever they learned about brotherhood has been erased by their return to civilization, it's all very sad, in this rather heavy handed ending.

 

 Hell in the Pacific is a rather dreary disappointing film, Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin the stars of the film were WWII veterans, but they must have had more interesting stories to tell than this time waster of a film.

Written by Reuben Bercovitch, Alexander Jacobs and Eric Bercovici, the running time is 103 minutes.