by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
John Boorman, Linda Blair, Louise Fletcher, Mike Flanagan, Karyn Kusama
Intro:
… fascinating, funny and even ends on a note of uplift.
There are good sequels, there are bad sequels and then there are legendarily awful sequels, and Exorcist II: The Heretic is one of the most notorious examples of the latter. Released in 1976, three years after the box office domination of the original film, The Heretic was set to be one of the most ambitious horror films of all time. Featuring a stacked cast, huge budget and a very in demand director, John Boorman, who made waves with Deliverance (1972), it looked like a classic Hollywood blockbuster in the making. And then people actually saw the film, hated it with a passion and it became one of the biggest flops of all time. The kind of film that made audiences say: “What the hell were they thinking?” Now, some 50 years later, Boorman and the Devil can finally answer that question, and it does so in a funny, entertaining and often oddly inspirational fashion.
Boorman and the Devil, for the most part, revolves around a candid and charming interview with the man himself, John Boorman (the devil doesn’t put in an appearance, sadly). Boorman, now in his early 90s, has little to prove these days and delivers a frank and fascinating account of one of cinema’s most misguided sequels. The fact that he didn’t particularly like the first film speaks volumes. Joining him are a sea of famous talking heads, writers, directors, actors and crew members who survived The Heretic’s seemingly cursed shoot. Many of the flick’s wounds were self-inflicted, mind you, with a bizarre, unfinished writing process, a narrative philosophy completely at odds with the original vision of Blatty and Friedkin and more ideas than sense.
People don’t set out to make a bad movie, or so conventional wisdom tells us, and what’s striking about this look back at the inception of this flick is that everyone involved genuinely wanted to create something artistic, hopeful and moving. Almost a juxtaposition to the first film, a riposte to the darkness and horror. The problem, of course, is that audiences wanted more of the darkness and horror, and less of the dreamy, sci-fi tinged, surreal, frequently nonsensical albeit absolutely gorgeous overstuffed vision that featured locust POV, a half maggoted Richard Burton and Linda Blair vamping as sexy version of the demon Pazuzu! If nothing else, the film is a lot!
Like Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), Boorman and the Devil offers a glimpse at a truly bizarre film, uniquely wrong-headed but fascinating. Unlike that flick, however, The Heretic actually got made! Director David Kittredge deftly weaves personal anecdotes into historical footage and moments of wry reflection, giving everyone the space to vent their decades old injuries about a catastrophic blunder.
Exorcist II: The Heretic is a bad film, no amount of revisionism will change that, but Boorman and the Devil’s dissection of how it all happened is fascinating, funny and even ends on a note of uplift. After all, an interesting failure is always more interesting than a lifeless, bland success.
They probably overdid it on the locusts, mind you.
