By Richard Winters
My Rating: 0 out of 10
4-Word Review: A really awful sequel.
It’s been four years since Regan (Linda Blair) had her bout of possession and is now living a seemingly normal life in New York City with her guardian Sharon (Kitty Winn). Regan does still see a psychiatrist, Dr. Tuskin (Louise Fletcher), who despite Regan’s denials that she can’t remember anything, is convinced that she does have some dormant memories that need to come to the surface. Philip (Richard Burton) is a priest who has been assigned to investigate the death of Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow), who was the priest who died while performing the exorcism on Regan. He meets with Dr. Tuskin and Regan and gets hooked up to a machine called the syncronizer, which allows Philip’s and Regan’s brainwaves to be connected, so he can explore the inner depths of her mind. It is here that he learns about the evil spirit Pazuzu, that was the one that inhabited Regan’s body years earlier, and how Father Merrin had rid a young boy named Kokumo of this same spirit while in Africa. When Philip learns that the now adult Kokumo (James Earl Jones) has developed a special power to defeat Pazuzu he travels to the continent to meet him.
Doing a sequel to the hit movie wasn’t a bad idea per say as there were still some open-ended questions like why did Pazuzu choose Regan’s body to inhabit instead of some other girls and what mental issues would Regan have to deal with after going through such a traumatic event? None of those were ever answered in the first film, but intriguing enough to me that I felt a second film was warranted and could’ve been quite compelling. Unfortunately, what we get wouldn’t even qualify as second-rate. Most of the problem lies with director John Boorman, who admitted in later interviews that his biggest crime was that he didn’t give the viewer what they wanted, which is the truth. I don’t mean to bash the guy as he’s helmed some classics in his own right, but when he professes that he was offered the job to direct the first installment but turned it down because he thought it was ‘repulsive’ then that should’ve disqualified him from getting any consideration to doing the second one.
Everything gets botched right from the beginning including a misguided reenactment of the final segment in the first film that honestly comes-off like a cheap parody. For one thing Father Merrin is seen standing at the end of Regan’s bed, when we know clearly from the first film that he was kneeling on the right side of the bed when he died. Also, due to Blair’s insistence that she didn’t want to go through the grueling routine of having to put on the demon make-up, so a stand-in took her place, but the results are clownish. The silly-‘synchonizer’ further hampers things as it appears more like a child’s toy and the cliched idea of simply attaching a few wires to each participant’s foreheads and that would be enough to get their mind’s ‘in-sync’ looks like something straight out of a tacky B-sci fi flick from the 50’s.
Not able to get Ellen Burstyn to sign-on really hurts though I can’t blame her for being reluctant but trying to use Kitty Winn as her replacement bombs. For one thing the Sharon character didn’t have that much of a prominent role in the first one, I barely even remembered her, and she was Burstyn’s secretary who didn’t interact that much with Blair, so for them to now be so ‘connected’ seemed like a stretch and having Winn sporting short hair, in an attempt I presume to make her ‘seem’ like Burstyn, was tacky. Von Sydow suffers a similar fate. He gets portrayed as being a younger version of his character here but only appears in flashbacks and doesn’t have much to say or do making it seem like it wasn’t even worth the effort.
Fletcher is good in that she played a cold, bitchy nurse in her previous film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but here shows her great acting ability at playing the total opposite and doing it convincingly. However, her character doesn’t help propel the action and is only there to react to things, which ultimately makes her presence one dimensional. Burton, whose talents I have always greatly admired even when he took less than stellar roles, but his appearance here has to be rock bottom. He admitted that he only did this for the paycheck, due to an expensive divorce he was going through with Liz, but the material doesn’t match his ability and it’s a career low even for him as he was known to make some bad project choices during the 70’s, but this was by far the worst.
To top things off there’s James Earl Jones wearing a giant bug outfit that nearly had me laughing out of my seat. The numerous shots of locusts and the sandy African landscape make it seem more like a nature movie, but whatever it is it’s not scary. It’s so convoluted it’s not even good enough to fall into the ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ category. It is cool though at least see a young Dana Plato playing an autistic child in a small but pivotal part.
My Rating: 0 out of 10
Released: June 17, 1977
Runtime: 1 Hour 57 Minutes
Rated R
Director: John Boorman
Studio: Warner Brothers
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Tubi, YouTube
Scopophilia 