Even all these years later it still beggars belief that a film as outstanding as The Exorcist (1973) should be followed by a film as dreadful as Exorcist II, still widely regarded as one of the worst sequels ever made. Everything that was so right about William Friedkin’s film is ruinously wrong here. Made without input from either Friedkin or the author of the original novel, William Peter Blatty, Exorcist II goes off at some very strange tangents, none of which are at all interesting.
Father Philip Lamont (Richard Burton), like Father Damien Karras before him, is struggling with his faith and attempts to rid a South American girl of the demon apparently possessing her. It ends in tragedy when the girl is burned to death and later a still traumatised Lamont is assigned to investigate the death of Father Lankester Merrin (Max Von Sydow), killed four years earlier while exorcising Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) who had been possessed by the Assyrian demon Pazuzu, “king of the evil sprits of the air” (named here on screen for the first time). His investigations lead him to the now teenage Regan, apparently fully recovered from her ordeal and being monitored by psychiatrist Dr Gene Tuskin (Louise Fletcher) who has developed a “synchronizer”, a biofeedback device that allows patients to synchronize their brainwaves. Lamont travels to Africa to talk to Kokumo (James Earl Jones) who as a boy had been exorcised from Pazuzu by Merrin and learns that the demon manifest as a locust and targets people with psychic healing powers. Eventually, Lamont and Regan return to the MacNeill home in Georgetown for a final showdown with Pazuzu…
Boorman was an infuriating director, capable of appalling pretentiousness (Zardoz (1974)) and fascinating work like Deliverance (1972) and Excalibur (1981). Sadly Exorcist II skews towards the former. He’d been approached to direct the first film and one has to say the film world had a very narrow escape when he turned it down because he objected to the way it treated children. Weirdly, when he decided that the world was ready for his contribution to the world of The Exorcist he and his screenwriter William Goodhart abandon the first film’s focus on faith and the more mysterious and arcane tenets of the Jesuits in favour of a weird mish-mash of half-baked mysticism and pseudo-science. Thus the emotional impact is gone – we don’t particularly care about Lamont and his curious ideas anywhere like we cared about Karras and his valiant struggles with his failing faith. Exorcist II is so determined to expunge poor Karras and his noble sacrifice from the story that he’s not even mentioned, even in passing, though Max Von Sydow returns as Father Merrin for the flashbacks and Kitty Winn turns up again as Sharon.
To be fair to Boorman although some of the blame for Exorcist II inevitably has to lie at his feet, the main issue is Goodhart’s terrible script. Boorman does what he can with it (he apparently rewrote chunks of it while the film was in production) and amid the many moments of hilarious silliness (any scene involving the “synchroniser”) finds room for scenes of real beauty and power (the flashbacks to the African exorcism, though when we revisited them in the two prequels Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) neither version looked anything like this). There’s no forgiving his laughably bad recreations of scenes from the original film though, nor for failing to make the film even remotely scary but much of the blame for this farrago has to lie with Goodhart.
Even without all the post-production tinkering – and Exorcist II was a much troubled production – the script was clearly a liability, full of terrible dialogue (“I’ve flown this route before – it was on the wings of a demon”), clunky exposition and silly metaphysical meanderings. There’s a lot of globe-trotting, much hanging out in hi-tech therapy centres and psychic trips through time and space but nothing to match the simple, visceral horror of what happened to a little girl in an anonymous Georgetown suburb. There’s some barely comprehensible guff about Regan, Kokumo and the South American girl being mysterious beings with healing powers that need to be protected and you have to wonder where this nonsense came from. And while you’re pondering that you’ll find yourself distracted by the weird incidentals – like wondering why Chris MacNeil (not featured here apart from a few dialogue references) kept the Georgetown house after all the horrors that happened there and who exactly is “the heretic” of the subtitle.
Boorman can’t do a lot with some of the script’s more outré moments – in particular repeated shots of Pazuzu as a locust is a ludicrous sight, though the massing swarm of hungry insects being scared off by villagers whirling bullroarers provide some of the film’s very few genuinely eerie moments. But there’s no excuse at all for the film’s lack of any of the sense of foreboding and escalating dread of the first film.
An already very odd film tips over into utter madness in the last 15 minutes as Pazuzu’s locust horde descends on Prospect Street, Regan meets her doppelganger (who looks nothing like her at first because Blair refused to wear the demon make-up again), Sharon sets herself alight and the house comes crashing down around Regan and a possessed Lamont. Regan also does a little dance mimicking the use of the bullroarers which seems to annoy Pazuzu so much that it just gives up on her and sets off in search of pastures new.
It’s extraordinary rubbish from beginning to end, a film that makes very little sense, treats the original film with no respect (If Pazuzu is still inside Regan, it makes a mockery of Karras’ sacrifice) and although it made a profit it found very few people willing to stand up for it. William A. Fraker’s photography is very nice and you can’t go far wrong with an Ennio Morricione score, even if some of his attempts at “ethnic” cues are a tad cringe-worthy but that’s about as much good as anyone can say about it.
Richard Burton gives one of his worst big screen performances, which given his dismal track record, particularly in the 1970s, is really saying something. Linda Blair may be a legitimate horror icon but she’s not much of an actress, though caught between the frequent histrionics of Burton and the seemingly bored underplaying of Louise Fletcher (who had not long before won an Oscar for her turn as Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) – and then turned up in this…) would be enough to confuse any young actor. And when she’s called upon to deadpan dialogue like “I was possessed by a demon, but I’m all right now” then one can only feel for her. At least James Earl Jones seems to be having a good time as Kokumo now all grown up to become a radical researcher into locust behaviour.
William Peter Blatty restored a semblance of dignity to his creation when he directed the much troubled but still far superior The Exorcist III (1990), the two competing prequels followed in 2004 and 2005 and a sequel television series – surprisingly rather good – aired for two seasons from 2016 to 2018. Perhaps unsurprisingly all of these subsequent additions to the franchise completely ignore the ridiculous Exorcist II.
The EOFFTV Review 
Strangely this was my first intro to the Exorcist universe when I was a kid. I only saw bits of it, due to how bad it probably was for the whole family. I remember that it was my first intro to actors like Richard Burton and James Earl Jones (in form that is after hearing his voice of Darth Vader). I don’t think that I noticed Louise Fletcher which in a way was good because Brainstorm was a better intro of her for me. I saw Exorcist III much later and was impressed with it and finally The Exorcist in its special re-release. Thanks, Kevin, for all your Exorcist reviews.
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