Speak of the Devil

Year: 1977

Director: John Boorman

Cast: Richard Burton, Linda Blair, Louise Fletcher 

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

So. It’s 1977. You’re faced with the task of creating a sequel to The Exorcist, the blockbuster smash hit that defined a generation of horror films, was nominated for 10 Oscars, won 2, and was rhapsodically minted the “scariest movie of all time.” What do you do? If your answer is “not make it,” you’ve made the right decision. And, to be fair, that’s exactly what director John Boorman did when he helmed Exorcist II: The Heretic, which contains not a scrap of material recognizable as an Exorcist movie, even though it features the return of three actors and a major location.

The marathon is already going well, I see.

In Exorcist II, Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) is living in the city with her caretaker Sharon (Kitty Winn), because her mother was wise enough not to get locked into a contract for this one. She regularly attends therapy with Dr. Gene Tuskin (the reliable medical professional Louise Fletcher, of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), despite the fact that she seems more well-adjusted than any 16-year-old that I've ever met. When Father Philip Lamont (Richard Burton) is sent by a Cardinal (Casablanca’s Paul Henried) to investigate the mid-exorcism death of Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), Tuskin suggests the use of a joint hypnosis machine to sync his mind with Regan’s, because this is more of a sci-fi fantasy movie than anything.

Through this link, the dormant demon Pazuzu shows Father Lamont glimpses of Merrin’s past, when he exorcised a young boy in Africa. This leads him to the discovery of a generation of faith healers, Regan among them, who have been targeted by the demon. Also, there’s a lot of locust metaphors. Then, like, he’s seduced by the demon’s thrall or something? And he visits the original Georgetown house to make out with Regan’s stand-in? I guess? I literally couldn’t spoil this movie if I wanted to, because it makes no flippin’ sense.

Also, James Earl Jones is in it, which is cool I guess.

In addition to the script being an incoherent trash fire, Exorcist II is a black hole of talent, sucking every last drop of quality from a battalion of very capable filmmakers. I mean, come on. Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, Linda Blair, Paul Henried, Max von Sydow, and James Earl Jones are in this cast. They have 12 Oscar nominations between them. And behind the camera you have Deliverance director John Boorman, legendary composer Ennio Morricone, the cinematographer of Rosemary’s Baby, and so on. This should have been an outstanding success. But guess what happens when you have a director (and uncredited screenplay revisionist) who has an open contempt for the material? Not great things, I can tell you that.

Exorcist II is not only a bad Exorcist movie, it’s a downright dreadful film by any metric on Earth. This is perhaps best exemplified by a scene taken directly from the continuity of Friedkin’s film, filling in the details of Father Merrin’s death via flashback. Set in the same room on the same night of The Exorcist, it has not one whit of its raw power. The staging is brutally boxy and inelegant, and the whole affair is lit like it’s an episode of Married with Children. That scene is the most painful because it egregiously draws comparison to the original film, but this kind of slack handling is apparent from start to finish.

The effects are accomplished mostly by a series of clunky cross dissolves that wouldn’t pass muster in a Lucio Fulci cheapie, the score trips between atonal shrieking and a disturbingly lush romantic keening, and the acting is uniformly vacant. It’s so deeply broken that it’s almost impossible to pinpoint exactly where everything begins to go wrong.

Even the wording of the title is confusing and terrible.

If I had to pick one thing that’s the most wrong with Exorcist II, I’d probably pass the buck to the screenplay. I’m not sure anybody could figure out what to do with it. I admire the audacity of Boorman’s idea to make the storyline about a more positive force, but he was so caught up in his own self-righteousness that he never noticed that, despite the original’s dour storyline, there’s a very positive message at the core: the day is saved and  priest makes a noble sacrifice because he’s finally found his faith. That’s pretty much how horror films work. When you make the narrative positive all the way through, it’s not a scary movie, it’s an episode of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

And did I mention it’s bloody incomprehensible? The entire first act is just people sitting around an ill-thought-out hypnosis machine straight out of Star Trek and talking calmly in circles while they endlessly visit the same flashback. Then it catapults Father Lamont into Africa where he hallucinates a laboratory inside a medicine man’s cave, a development that is completely ignored by the movie, which chooses to accept both perceptions as the truth. Afterward, an inexplicable number of people run to Georgetown for no discernible reason, then are either killed by plot holes or packaged off into an ambiguous ending that feels like it wraps up an entirely different movie than the one we watched.

Not that Exorcist II feels like a singular movie for more than 12 seconds at a time.

It’s despicable claptrap, and I want nothing more to do with it. The only scene worth sticking around for is The Prom Night-esque interlude where Linda Blair tap-dances to “Lullaby of Broadway.” If I wanted a haphazard grab bag of random scenes full of over-the-top characters, I’d watch SNL instead. Exorcist II: The Heretic is an unscary, befuddling slog that is a failure as a sequel, as a movie, and as a paycheck for everybody involved.

TL;DR: Exorcist II: The Heretic is a failure as a sequel, as a horror movie, and as a piece of entertainment.

Rating: 2/10
Word Count: 1008
Reviews In This Series
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)
The Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)
Exorcist: The Beginning (Harlin, 2004)
Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (Schrader, 2005)

Census Bloodbath: They Must Be Working For The Skin Trade

Year: 1981

Director: Michael Laughlin

Cast: Michael Murphy, Dan Shor, Fiona Lewis

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It’s a miracle that any Australian films get made at all, let alone in the slasher genre, let alone relatively good entries in the slasher genre. So let’s take a moment to respect how incredibly improbable it is that Strange Behavior (AKA Dead Kids) even exists.

I’ll wait.

That said, Strange Behavior is about as far from the slasher formula as it’s possible to get while still being on the same general framework. It’s like somebody gave the Australians a car chassis and they built a mechanical elephant.

Strange Behavior centers around the small town of Galesburg, (cough) Illinois. Pete Brady (Dan Shor) is a high school senior and the son of the sheriff, John (Michael Murphy of Shocker). Pete doesn’t know why, but John is strangely resistant to letting him apply to the local university, to the point of refusing to give him money for the application fee. His friend Oliver (Marc McClure of Freaky Friday) tips him off about a behavioral research program at the college’s psychology department that will give him cash quick and Pete agrees to check it out.

What Olivern neglects to tell Pete is that this research program, led by the beautiful and wicked Dr. Parkinson (Fiona Lewis) is brainwashing teens into murderous acts by stabbing them in the eyes with syringes, with the final target being Pete’s own father, who wanted to destroy the department’s program years ago when their experiments ended up killing his wife. This is the final revenge of the murderous mad scientist Dr. LeSange (Arthur Dignam), whose motives seem rather small-minded for a man who can make anybody do anything he wants.

I guess it’s the simple things in life that really matter.

The most striking thing about Strange Behavior is that its screenplay is almost supernaturally well-constructed. Every piece of it fits together perfectly, forward and backward, in ways both obvious and subtle. Foreshadowing and payoffs twirl together in a delicate dance, but it never asks more of the viewer than they can handle. You could write textbooks off the thing.

The film was penned by Bill Condon, who would go on to make a name for himself with films like Gods and Monsters, Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh, and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1. Hey, we can’t all be Spielberg. In addition to his deft plotting (which hews more toward a sci-fi/small town soap structure with a smattering of slasher kills for flavor), Condon leaves us with a variety of simple, but shaded characters that make the setting feel incredibly present. The film lives in its tiny character interactions, building the relationships between the townspeople and quietly curating a picturesque American idyll before it begins to heartily wrench it apart.

When it finally gets around to doing this, it’s not particularly terrifying, but that comes with the territory. The slasher genre was so well worn by even that point in 1981 that any variations, while welcome, were still about as scary as a glass of warm milk. It’s odd to say this about a film where a character slits his own wrists to a jangling Tangerine Dream soundtrack, but Strange Behavior is soothing. It’s comfort horror: not bad, not great. It fills you up and keeps you warm. But it doesn’t scare you or turn your stomach.

Unless you’re deathly afraid of bro perms.

Everything about Strange Behavior, save its slasher savant screenplay, coasts along at a level just a tick above “acceptable.” The cinematography is crisp, clear, and professional. It makes sure we can see everything but doesn’t try any funny business in the meantime. The sets are similarly wrought. They are provided the exact amount of dressing needed to believe that they might house actual humans, then they call it day (save for one diner set, which looks like someone spilled pink puffy paint on everything so they had to clear away the props, but an emergency forced them to film that day anyway).

The typical campiness of the 80’s slashers (which wouldn’t kick into high gear for another year or so) was also at a low ebb, save for a strange, fully choreographed dance sequence to “Lightnin’ Strikes” that I can’t for the life of me find any reasonable explanation for other than the fact that Bill Condon liked that song. At least the deaths are decent. They’re not particularly numerous or gory, but they’re reasonably chilling, especially considering the unwilling nature of their murderers. And two chase sequences in particular muster up some crumbs of tension – one as a teen girl is harassed in a swimming pool and the killer cuts the string of beads that she clings to, the other as a housekeeper discovers a body and learns that the killer’s still in the house.

By far the biggest actual flaw of the film is the shift in focus from Pete to John in the third act. Scriptwise, it’s an interesting reversal, but this forces the emotional crux of the film to fall on the shoulders of Michael Murphy, who is by far its weakest actor. Imagine if all of a sudden during the climax of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Audrey Hepburn stepped out for a smoke break and Mickey Rooney took her place. It’s something like that. But he’s not enough to totally knock the movie off its feet.

In short, Strange Behavior isn’t a film for anybody who wants to have a great time at their slumber party. For miserable lowlifes like me, it’s a breath of fresh air, but otherwise it’s nothing special.

Killer: A variety of teenagers orchestrated by Dr. LeSange (Arthur Dignam)

Final Girl: Pete Brady (Dan Shor)

Best Kill: Mrs. Haskell’s throat is slit as she describes her killer over the telephone.

Sign of the Times: Pete attends a costume party with an I Dream of Jeannie and a Flying Nun in attendance.

Scariest Moment: Pete pees blood after passing out in the diner.

Weirdest Moment: Pete walks into the bathroom bare-ass naked while his father is getting ready for work.

Champion Dialogue: “You couldn’t get an ‘A’ on Sesame Street.”

Body Count: 5

1. Brian has his eyes gouged out with a scalpel.
2. Waldo is stabbed in the throat.
3. Timothy has his hand cut off.
4. Mrs. Haskell is stabbed in the back and has her throat slit.
5. Dr. LeSange is stabbed in the neck.

TL;DR: Strange Behavior is an off book, only decent slasher.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1096