Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

Rated R for demon stuff, nudity, and general sacrilege.  Also, the movie really dances around the fact that it is sexualizing a sixteen-year-old character.  It doesn't do it overtly, but it is still something that happens in the film and is part of the plot.  There's a lot of "Geez Louise" moments, not because you are watching something so horrifying as opposed to "That's the thing that they decided to keep in the movie?"  It's all stuff that doesn't add to the vibe of the movie.  It's almost like it's trying to be a "big boy" movie while overly stressing that this movie is incredibly immature.  Also, the commentary on Africans is juvenile and unresearched.

DIRECTORS:  John Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg

People told me it was bad.  I knew that I was going into something that might not have been amazing.  But, woof!  I'm going to try to be as generous as I can with this film, mainly because I don't regret watching it.  But this might be the worst sequel I've ever seen.  At least the worst sequel to a banger that I have ever seen.  Here's the deal.  I have been reading the scary novels that I own.  I own The Exorcist.  I read The Exorcist.  But I did not want to rewatch the original Exorcist again.  I've seen it two-or-three times (admittedly, not recently enough to blog about it).  But I thought, let's at least see where the story could have gone.  I've seen some of the newer Exorcist sequels / prequels.  But I never knocked out the numbered sequels.  I also hear that Exorcist III is halfway decent.  

So I watched Exorcist II: The Heretic.

I can't imagine trying to sequelize the first film directly.  I can see making a tonal sequel about a different possession with a different priest.  But following the Regan / Fr. Merrin storyline is a bad choice.  A lot of the problems that I have with this film is the fact that it is an attempt to capitalize on the success of the first film.  What made the first film so scary is that it is such a small and intimate film.  We don't get a lot from the first movie.  There's a little hint that some foreign land holds a key to the devil.  Okay.  But most of the movie ignores that stuff.  It's there to make the devil seem old.  Because an ancient evil has been stirred, our modern sensibilities probably aren't equipped to handle anything ancient or of that scale.  That's fascinating, but ultimately unimportant to the character drama that unfolds over the course of the movie.  What makes the film scary is that Regan didn't do anything to deserve this.  She's an average twelve-year-old.  I also like the fact that this is a story about a priest who is overwhelmed by the notion of putting his faith to the test.  He is the most human character ever.  Fr. Merrin is the superhero priest, but we relate to Fr. Karras, who is trying his best in spite of being woefully unready to face this demon that possesses Regan.  That's the story.  It places a demonic / supernatural battle in the scope of upper-middle class America and that's the cool part.  

No one involved in Exorcist II: The Heretic understood that.

What the folks behind The Heretic saw was that Fr. Merrin was a Van Helsing type and Regan was able to fight off the devil, making her something special.  Nope.  None of that.  I don't care for that.  Cool, I get that people might be interested in that short scene at the beginning with Fr. Merrin uncovering an ancient evil.  That's Vatican I meets Indiana Jones.  But what makes that mystery interesting is the fact that it is a mystery.  And the movie dosen't even handle the mystery right.  Part of why mysterious things are cool is that our imaginations probably do more with that mystery than anything that the movie can tell us.  Everyone involved in The Heretic quickly discovered that every answer kind of sounded stupid.  So the mystery is shrouded in figurative language.  I'm going to give them some points. A mystery like the devil should be talked about in terms of metaphor.  We don't want the devil to be a guy in a mask or a rubber suit.  So keeping that ancient evil as a metaphor is smart.  But the problem with metaphor that it, too, needs to be used sparingly.

Extended metaphor can be an impressive thing.  After all, I adore a well-developed allegory.  But an allegory is canonically the story while keeping a deeper meaning.  The Heretic uses metaphor not as allegory, but as covering up for the fact that it doesn't really know what it is talking about.  One of the few effective images in the movie is this shot of a locust.  I'm sure that it doesn't age well, but I actually found it kind of impressive, having this giant hovering locust observing the events of the story.  But then the movie tried explaining the heck out of the locust.  It started talking about how there is a good locust who can bring the bad locusts out of their frenzy.  It talked about bumping legs.  Yeah, okay.  That might be a thing.  I'm skeptical, but I can pretend that someone did a deep dive into locust research.  But "bumping legs" doesn't apply to humans.  The movie commits to this locust story for Regan and her relationship to the demon Pazuzu.  (By the way, that's a name that should be used conservatively so it doesn't come across as silly.) But when demons are screaming "Brush legs", you know there's nothing really at stake.  This isn't a story about people fighting something that they don't understand.  It's undefined metaphor that screenwriters are hoping that no one calls them on.  

My biggest frustration in the movie is just how inauthentic the whole thing feels.  The first Exorcist film gave us a narrative and a tone that felt like we were looking behind the curtain at something forbidden.  Sure, the first Exorcist is a lot of Hollywood.  But there's an element of verisimilitude to the whole thing.  It felt like Fr. Merrin and Fr. Karras were representations of what it meant to be an exorcist, standing on the front lines to fight the devil.  Everything in that felt like they were trying to make this thing feel right.  Nothing in The Heretic feels right.  Honestly, nothing.  This is a movie, once again, that talks about the divide between mental health and spiritual warfare.  But neither of them feels like it is fighting the actual fight.  Instead, the movie decided to go with cool imagery versus anything that might be close to reality.  A lot of this movie takes place at a mental health facility.  Regan attends regular therapy with Gene.  I always liked that the Exorcist films would acknowledge that things that one generation called possession, another would attribute to lacking mental health access.  Sure, these things would be opposed to each other in these narratives, but that's just part of storytelling.

But honestly everything about how this movie viewed the mental health field is so bananas.   If anything, the movie is so obsessed with doing crazy imagery and something different --a concept, in theory, that I'm not opposed to --that it reads as wrong all the way through.  What mental health office would treat patients like subjects in a zoo that all the other subjects can monitor?  That glass office design was the worst example of retro-futurism that I've ever seen.  It made not a lick of sense.  Also, every single mental health thing was being treated almost like a 1920s insane asylum, only now coupled with a sense of empathy.  I'm pretty sure that the writers of this movie have no idea what autism really is.  That's pretty darned bad.  But now I have to call out the elephant in the room: the technology.

Why was the script so lazy when it came to having Regan and Fr. Lamont exchanging images?  The notion that there is a therapist out there sitting on mind-transference and that's just casually accepted?  Everyone in this movie somehow feels incredibly comfortable with something that doesn't make a lick of sense.  All of them seem to have an intimate understanding of what the rules of this tech really is and are willing to comment on it.  Seriously, this would change the way that science is viewed and it's only used as a device to put images of the devil in each others' brains?  And so much of the movie depended on this thing for storytelling.  It just kept on showing up in scene after scene.  It's like a low-budget film (not unlike Phantasm) where the movie kept finding excuses to come back to this piece of tech for no reason.  I stress this "no reason" bit because the story doesn't actually know what the story of Exorcist II really is.

Nothing in this movie feels like an imminent threat.  If anything, a lot of the story imbues meaning into stupid decisions.  From Fr. Lamont's perspective, he's trying to salvage Fr. Merrin's reputation before gossip labels him a heretic.  That, at least, ties into the title.  It's a small goal considering that the last movie had Regan being tortured by the devil.  That stuff will still come into play.  But Regan doesn't seem all that bothered by the devil in this one.  If anything, it is the constant appearance of Fr. Lamont that seems to awaken Pazuzu inside of her.  But even that, it feels like the movie has to go there because Regan has a wealth of random plot threads inside of her instead of just a devil who was possessing her at one point.  (I'm also not sure how Pazuzu is back inside Regan or why its so interested in this girl who seems a bit distant from the story?)   Instead, Regan really wants to communicat that there is a church in Africa that has a history of locusts?  I don't know why we're so on the locusts.  I mentioned them early as a metaphor, but the movie really wants to talk about these locusts and this priest who may or may not be a doctor?  There's so much that is left up to interpretation that the movie doesn't really know what it is talking about at almost any point in the movie.

What I do like is the notion that Fr. Lamont makes some poor decisions in his desperate attempt to do something good.  I don't know why.  Sure, I'm not exactly backing his character here.  It was just something that I could at least get invested in.  In his hunt for Kokumo (another name that gets shouted as much as possible), he feels frustrated.  Sure, that frustration happens pretty early in the story.  I will admit that Fr. Lamont gets pelted with stones (so I don't have to write the word "stoned").  But it seems like Pazuzu is desperate to take over Fr. Lamont.  It really isn't clear what Fr. Lamont is going through for a chunk of the movie except that he walks around in a fugue in the final act of the film as he heads to Washington.  (Also, returning to Washington shouldn't matter to Pazuzu.  That's such a callback for the viewer and not the story.) I do have to throw Richard Burton under the bus for this one.  This movie, for all of its terribleness, has an incredible cast who just don't know what to do with this movie.  But Richard Burton is one note throughout.  I feel like he's hate-acting his way through this movie, meaning that we don't have much insight into Lamont as a character.  If this is a franchise where people get possessed and could have character changes, angry-ing each scene doesn't make a lick of sense.

Golly, this movie was terrible.  I doubt that I'll be able to get to Part III this year.  I know that I should, just because I'll have the momentum behind me.  But if Part III isn't an improvement, I'll eat my hat.