Tag Archives: Linda Blair

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

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

The Exorcist (1973)

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 10 out of 10

4-Word Review: Possessed by the devil.

Chris McNeil (Ellen Burstyn) is a famous Hollywood actress living on location in a neighborhood of Washington D.C. known as Georgetown where the latest movie she’s working on is being shot. She’s renting a posh home along with her two servants (Rudolf Schundler, Willi Engstrom), her secretary Sharon (Kitty Winn) and her 12-year-old daughter Regan (Linda Blair). Things start out fine, but then Regan begins exhibiting odd behaviors. Chris takes her to several doctors as Regan’s anti-social traits continue. The doctors prescribe various drugs, but nothing works. At her wits end Chris, a non-believer, finally resorts to asking a local priest, Father Karras (Jason Miller) if he’ll perform an exorcism on her daughter. Karras though is going through a crisis of faith and doesn’t believe the archaic ritual will help her but becomes more convinced after he visits the girl who displays knowledge of his personal life that she would not have known about otherwise. Eventually he asks the church for permission to conduct one, but under the condition that he do it alongside Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) an elderly man with a heart condition who had done an exorcism many years earlier in Africa.

The film was based on the bestselling novel of the same name that in-turn was inspired by the true-life event that occurred in 1949 where priests performed an exorcism on a troubled 14-year-old boy named Ronald Edwin Hunkeler. Author William Peter Blatty, read about the incident while a student attending Georgetown University. After having become a successful screenwriter during the 60’s where he wrote mainly comedies for director Blake Edwards, he approached his agent about writing a horror novel about a child possessed but was initially talked out of it. Then in 1968 he watched Rosemary’s Baby, which he felt had a weak ending that he could’ve done better, so he brought up the exorcism concept to a book publisher while attending a cocktail party and he agreed pay him a $25,000 advance to write the book in 10-months. Upon publication the sales were at first sluggish, but then after an appearance on the ‘Dick Cavett Show’ they skyrocketed, which soon lead to a movie rights deal with Blatty commissioned to write the script.

The movie follows the book closely though in a more condense form with scenes that were groundbreaking in its level of explicitness and perversity including an infamous crucifix masturbation moment. However, it’s the angiography that many viewers found the most disturbing. While it’s shockingly explicit it’s also lauded by medical professionals as being highly accurate and for many years afterwards was used in radiological training films. Many critics at the time condemned the scene labeling it ‘irresponsible’ and ‘needless’, but I liked it. A good horror movie should put the viewer in an uneasy state right from the start and then continue to turn the screws tighter as it goes on. This moment clearly telegraphs to the audience that the filmmakers will not shy away from showing something graphic even if it’s outside of good taste and if they’re going to be this brazen with this scene then it makes it all the more unsettling about what’s to come next. 

In many ways, and I don’t believe it was intentional, but the film does become an inadvertent satire on the medical, psychiatric community as their ‘diagnosis’ on Regan are really just guesses and the extreme reliance on prescribing medications, which they feel will somehow ‘resolve everything’. I didn’t really have a problem with this as I think many doctors at the time, and maybe even now, would respond the same way if given such a bizarre case. My one issue though is that eventually one of them, played by Peter Masterson, gets up in front of a roundtable of other doctors and suggests that Chris take Regan to an exorcist. I don’t believe any real medical doctor would ever suggest it or certainly be met with pushback by the other medical professionals in the room. I realize the movie had to find a way to progress to the third act, so the idea of an exorcist needed to be brought up at some point, but it would’ve made more sense had it come from Chris’s servants, who were deeply spiritual already. Chris could’ve scoffed at it at first, but then after thinking and even reading up on it, would eventually relent. 

The performances are uniformly excellent. Burstyn was not the first choice as there were other actresses more famous than her at the time, but her ability to display distraught emotion and continue to do so as it progresses and still keep it fresh and genuine makes her the best person for the role bar none. Blair is quite good too though Mercedes McCambridge does voice the demon during the exorcism moments, which kind of affects things. Don’t get me wrong McCambridge’s deep vocals makes it scarier, but had the lines, which are quite obscene, been recited by Blair herself it would’ve made it more shocking. Plus, it would still allow credence for the doctors to say it was a mental illness and not a possession since whatever was being said was coming from her natural voice. 

The real star though is Father Karras as he’s the one that goes through an actual internal change during the course of the story, from a person who’s had a crisis of faith to ultimately regaining it. Miller, who’s perfect, was not the original choice as Stacey Keach had already been offered the role and signed on, but then director William Friedkin went to watch the play That Championship Seasonwhich Miller had written and afterwards the two met backstage and Friedkin talked about his new project that got Miller to describe his own Catholic upbringing and his quarrels with it, which convinced Friedkin that he’d be the better actor and thus the studio bought Keach out of his contract. As much as I like Keach this was still a good move as Miller’s guilt-ridden face, which gets on full display every time he’s in front of the camera, leaves a lasting visual impression. I also liked the way the character remains skeptical until the very end versus other horror films that would have the people believing in the supernatural right away, or pretty quickly. However, in real-life there’s always going to be cynical people, so allowing in their apprehension through Karras makes the story stronger and more three-dimensional. 

Spoiler Alert!

I felt the ending, in which Chris pronounces Regan to be ‘cured’ and not remembering a thing and then driving away, to be a bit lacking. Chris was portrayed as being secular, but you’d think after what she saw her daughter going through would’ve changed that. This could’ve been done subtly by having her holding a crucifix, something she had despised her staff putting underneath her Regan’s pillow earlier or just shown wearing a small one around her neck. 

I also didn’t like the side-story dealing with the Burke Dennings character, played by Jack MacGowran, being apparently pushed out the window by the demon and falling to his death down a flight of cement stairs as this takes away the impact of when it happens to Father Karras at the end. Instead of Karras’ death being the shocking, unexpected twist that it should’ve it comes off more like a ‘here-we-go-again’ thing. If I had been the director I would’ve removed both Dennings death and Lee J. Cobb character completely as I really didn’t think he added much or helped progress the story forward. I would’ve still had the steps being shown in the early part of the film as a forewarning by having Karras runup them during his early morning workouts and this could’ve been when he first met Chris as they’d bump into each other one day while she was leaving to go somewhere. The head being twisted all the way around, which is described as happening to Dennings, but never shown, could’ve been revealed as occurring with Karras, possibly with his eyes glowing when the pedestrians come running to his aid, which would’ve been a good creepy final horror visual. 

My Rating: 10 out of 10

Released: December 26, 1973

Runtime: 2 Hours 15 Minutes

Rated R

Director: William Friedkin

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

Wild Horse Hank (1979)

wildhorse

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Teen girl saves horses.

Based on the novel ‘The Wild Horse Killers’ by Mel Ellis the story centers around a teen girl named Hank (Linda Blair) who while tracking down her escaped stallion comes upon a group of men abusing some horses. She later learns that these men plan on destroying them in order to resell their meat for pet food. Hank becomes determined to herd them along treacherous terrain to the safety of a federal park where the horses will be free to roam without danger of being hunted. The problem is that it will be 150-mile trek and her father (Richard Crenna) doesn’t feel she’ll be up to the job, but Hank isn’t use to taking no for an answer and decides, with rifle in hand, to take on the challenge.

What stood out for me was the gorgeous western Canadian setting filmed on-location at both Dinosaur Provincial and Waterton Lakes National Park in the province of Alberta. The vast open view gives one a true sense of the outdoors and the rugged elements. The portrayal of the towns folk particularly the girlfriend of one of the bad guys, played by Barbara Gordon, who refers to her toddler son as her ‘popcorn fart’ and allows him to sip beer while complaining to everyone that he’s ‘a burden’ displays in raw fashion the economic hardship of country living and how fringe some in that region are and what levels they’d be willing to resort to in order to try and get out of it. It also gives a motivation for why the men are as savage as they are and it isn’t so much that they’re just ‘evil’, but more because other opportunities in such isolated areas are sadly few and far between.

The men are portrayed differently than in most other films where bad guys are given menacing looks and threatening presence. Here though they’re more like non-descript jobos you might find at the neighborhood bar, who on their own don’t pose much of a threat and like with the culprits in the classic film Straw Dogs don’t really become scary until they band together showing how otherwise benign people can become dangerous through peer pressure and financial insecurity, which in a way ends up making them even scarier.

Blair can certainly be a great actress if given the right material and knowing how much she loves animals I’m sure she took on this project because the theme was close to her heart, but the character doesn’t offer her much acting range. Normally the protagonist is supposed to grow and change in some way during the course of a movie, but here she’s one-dimensional. She’s super head-strong right from the start and remains that way to the end making her personal journey static. Had she been insecure at the beginning and then learned to overcome those feelings would’ve at least given the character a genuine arch.

I was surprised too that Crenna, who’s only adequate in his role and borders on being miscast, doesn’t go along with his daughter on her trek. He argues with her about how dangerous it is and yet ultimately waves her on her way and stays home. Had he tagged with her there could’ve been more opportunity for conversation and learned more about these people instead of long segments of silence, which makes the viewer more emotionally detached from what the character is going through instead of engaged.

I know I’ve complained about other adventure movies that throw in a hooky romance as a subplot, which I usually find annoying and yet this is a rare case where I wish it had been done. There’s a young good-looking guy named Charlie, played by Michael Wincott, who’s related to the poachers, but teeters the fence on whose side he’s on. He has some interactions with Blair during her trek and seemed like he was a potential love interest, but then he disappears only to come back later. He should’ve stayed all the way through as they made an interesting and cute couple with just enough animosity to keep it spicy.

Spoiler Alert!

There is a scene where Blair’s horse gets injured and she’s forced to shoot it, which I found powerful and the climactic sequence in which her father, who conveniently reappears again, gets all the truckers to create a roadblock, which stops the traffic, so the horses can cross the road. Overall though the film lacks subtext. The formula is too simple and straight forward. It may interest preteens especially those who love horses, but the main characters aren’t multi-dimensional.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: May 15, 1979

Runtime: 1 Hour 35 Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Eric Till

Studio: Canadian Film Development Corporation

Available: DVD-R

Grotesque (1988)

grotesque

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 0 out of 10

4-Word Review: Punks versus deformed boy.

Lisa (Linda Blair) invites her friend Kathy (Donna Wilkes) over to her remote parent’s cabin for the weekend to help her get over a recent painful break-up. Lisa’s father Orville (Guy Stockwell) is a famous special effects artist for horror movies and the home is filled with all sorts of spooky masks and props. Unfortunately a gang of punks lead by Scratch (Brad Wilson) invade the home looking for money. Lisa’s parents are brutally murdered as well as Kathy. Lisa manages to get away, but eventually chased down outside in the snow. Yet the punks do not realize that another person is in the home, Patrick (Robert Apisa), who resides in a hidden room. He’s a boy with massive facial deformities that the parents kept in a secret room, but who is able to escape after the massacre. He then chases the punks down and begins offing them one-by-one while the police and Orville’s brother Rod (Tab Hunter) also go after the punks.

Filmed on-location in Big Bear Lake the film has a similar storyline to the Canadian cult classic Death Weekend and while that one had its share of faults it’s still far better than this, which has so many issues it’s had to know where to begin. The overly exaggerated performances of the punks, particularly by their leader who acts like he’s consumed way too much caffeine, is one of the bigger problems. There’s also no explanation for how they manage to find Orville’s very remote house especially since their van breaks down on the way. They try to ask Lisa for help, but she drives on, so who eventually came to their rescue to get them back on the road, or did they walk there and if so that should’ve been shown. It’s also irritating how they’re shown outside the home one second and then magically inside the place the next, but with no explanation for how they get in.

Linda Blair is certainly a fine actress, but she gets partially to blame for this monstrosity since she also co-produced. Donna Wilkes is quite appealing as usual and had she stayed in it the whole way and became the heroine I would’ve given it more points, but once she goes down it really gets bad. I felt the idea of having her sleep in the same bed with Lisa in Lisa’s bedroom looked a bit odd. If they were 8-year-olds on a sleepover that might be fine, but adult women, who were not in an intimate relationship, would most likely want more privacy and the home from the outside looked to have three stories, so you’d think there would be an extra spare bedroom, or two.

I didn’t like the addition of the Patrick character at all. Patrick gets mentioned briefly by Lisa and her mother, but I felt the viewer needed to be more fully aware that there was a secret room and someone in it long before the punks arrive. I didn’t understand why this deformed individual had such amazing strength either. If he had been cooped-up in a tiny room his whole life then I’d think the reverse would be true. His muscles would atrophy due to under use and he’d be weaker than normal instead of stronger.

Spoiler Alert!

The addition of the Tab Hunter character I actually liked. He plays a rugged, macho guy who tries to single-handily hunt down the punks and plays it with a fun style. I could’ve even tolerated the one twist ending that revealed Patrick to be his son and that Hunter himself was deformed and only able to hide it by wearing a plastic, form-fitting mask created by his brother. What I couldn’t stand was the double-twist, which has the whole thing being a movie created by Orville and as everyone is sitting in the theater watching it the film reel inside the projection booth gets messed with by a wolf man and Frankenstein, who then proceed to scare everyone out of the cinema when they walk in.

There’s no way anyone would get scared by two idiots that look to be wearing a tacky Halloween get-up and to give the whole thing a comical ending when the rest of it had been played-up as being serious is quite jarring. Normally after watching a bad movie and I feel disappointed, but in his case I was angry. It’s a genuine insult to have to sit through this and I honestly felt the writer-director should’ve been punished for having the audacity to make it and think anyone would be stupid enough to enjoy it.

My Rating: 0 out of 10

Released: September 9, 1988

Runtime: 1 Hour 29 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Joe Tornatore

Studio: Empire Pictures

Available: DVD, Fandor, Plex, Tubi, Amazon Video

Airport 1975 (1974)

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Stewardess pilots the plane.

A businesses man (Dana Andrews) suffers a fatal heart attack while piloting his private plane causing his aircraft to fly directly into the cockpit of a Boeing 747, which kills the co-pilot (Roy Thinnes), the navigator (Erik Estrada) and seriously injures the pilot (Efrem Zimbalist Jr).  This forces the plane’s head stewardess (Karen Black) to take control of the plane even though she has no experience. Those at the control tower try to direct her via a headset on what to do, which helps steady the jet while they devise a way to get a professional pilot onto the craft in order to land it.

Compared to Airport this is a real letdown. In the first film the individual passengers came off like real people all suffering from their own personal dilemmas, but here they’re more like cardboard caricatures that barely have any speaking lines and there only to show panicked expressions and not much else.

The dialogue and ‘drama’ quickly becomes inadvertently campy. Linda Blair plays a Pollyanna-like girl suffering from an undisclosed illness who befriends a nun (Helen Reddy) who breaks out into an impromptu song on a guitar that would have most passengers complaining of noise pollution. Playing herself is aging silent film actress Gloria Swanson who dictates her autobiography into a tape recorder as she is on the plane, which seems dumb because it allows the other passengers to overhear it although at least for their benefit it will allow them to avoid having to buy the book once it’s published since they will know all about the juicy details already. The only entertaining passenger is Myrna Loy as a tipsy old lady who enjoys drinking boilermakers.

The plane’s excessively wide interior and its large seats make it seem more like the inside of a luxury train. The plane even has a winding stairwell at the center of it for people to walk up. I’ve flown on many jets in my life and have never seen one with an upstairs/downstairs. If you’ve been on a plane that has had one then please let me know. (Note since this review was written one of the followers to this blog, Rob, has supplied us with pics of an actual 747 from that era and proves that indeed these things described above did exist at one time in a plane, so please be sure to check-out his links to pics in the comments section.)

The special effects get badly botched. The sequence involving the small engine plane crashing into the jet looks fake as the plane gets shown through the cockpit window and is quite obviously matted in on a bluescreen. You can clearly tell too that an inflatable dummy was used as the co-pilot when he gets sucked out through the hole that is formed from the crash. The scene where the replacement pilot (Ed Nelson), who tries to board the plane to help land it, is killed when his release cord becomes caught in the jagged metal, comes-off as unintentionally  funny instead of horrific.

The outdoor aerial footage shot over the Wasatch Mountains is the film’s one redeeming element. I also enjoyed Karen Black in what is likely her definitive role. She has played so many kooky, offbeat characters that it’s interesting seeing her portray a normal one. I just wished that she would’ve piloted the plane the whole way through and even landed it. Having Charlton Heston, as a professional pilot, literally ‘drop-in’ and takeover is far less compelling. It also seems quite sexist by intimating that women aren’t capable of taking on challenges to their completion and at some point a man must step-in even when the women seem to be handling the situation quite well without them.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: October 18, 1974

Runtime: 1Hour 47Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Jack Smight

Studio: Universal

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

Roller Boogie (1979)

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Save the roller rink.

Terry (Linda Blair) comes from an affluent upbringing, but resents how little attention that she gets from her busy, preoccupied parents (Roger Perry, Beverly Garland). She finds refuge with the roller skating crowd that populates Venice Beach and starts up a relationship with Bobby (Jim Bray) who has aspirations of going to the Olympics. The two team up as a couple to win a roller boogie contest only to realize that the rink where it is to be held has been threatened for closure by an unscrupulous land develop (Mark Goddard) who uses mob-like tactics to get what he wants. Terry, Bobby and he rest of the roller skating crowd plot a way to save the place before it’s too late.

The film is nothing more than a vapid gimmick made to cash in on the roller boogie fad that caught on in the late ‘70s for a few seconds before mercifully fading away. Director Mark L. Lester who has done some great work with other low budget films by making them compact and exciting fails to the do the same here. Way too much footage showing the kids roller skating around the rink that quickly becomes derivative and almost nauseating. The script by Barry Schneider is filled with an overabundance of colloquial phrases that gives the dialogue an amateurish and grating quality. It also plays up the stereotypes of rich people to the extreme almost putting it on a camp level without intentionally trying to be campy.

The storyline dealing with Terry’s rich family background doesn’t make sense. For one thing Blair is all wrong for the part as she conveys too much of a down-to-earth personality almost like she has no relation to her parents and not from that environment, but instead plucked from a working-class neighborhood and supplanted into the home like some fish-out-of-water.

Why this young woman, who has a scholarship to Juillard, would want to win a trivial roller boogie contest anyways is a mystery? What long term benefits is it going to get her? The story would’ve worked better had it borrowed the Saturday Night Fever formula where Terry was from a poor, struggling background, of which Blair’s acting skills better reflects, who needs to win the contest to achieve some money and get herself out of a desperate situation, which also would’ve gotten the viewer more emotionally connected to her dilemma.

The storyline dealing with the roller rink being forced out of business is dumb too. With such large crowds of teens the place should be rolling in dough, so why isn’t it and isn’t there another roller rink in the area that the kids could go to instead? If the kids were really smart they would simply wait a week for this silly fad to go out-of-style and then jump into the new, completely different silly fad that would come along to replace it.

Bray had no formal acting training and was merely brought in for his roller skating skills, which are impressive, but his speaking voice is annoying. Despite being from California he has a strangely distinct Nordic accent like someone raised in the upper Midwest and better suited as a cast member for Fargo. By comparison Blair’s acting comes off as pretty strong in the scenes that she shares with him, but then again with Bray’s placid presence just about anybody and their pet hamster could’ve achieved the same thing.

On the flip-side from a completely voyeuristic standpoint the film is kind of fun as it drowns itself in late ‘70’s kitsch giving it a certain tacky appeal seeing the people on screen revel in it that now I’m sure would be quite embarrassed by it, which is why I suppose this film has achieved a revival of sorts with modern day audiences.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: December 19, 1979

Runtime: 1Hour 44Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Mark L. Lester

Studio: United Artists

Available: DVD, Blu-ray