International Exorcist II: The Heretic Arrow Films UK Limited Edition blu-ray (1 Viewer)

[Worth]

‘The worst film ever made’? Why Exorcist II: The Heretic is truly the sequel from hell

How a director who hated the original, a befuddled Richard Burton and demonic locusts made a film so bad it had audiences’ heads spinning

www.telegraph.co.uk

 

[JoshZ]

So, of course, he was the natural choice to hire to make a sequel.

It was definitely an odd choice, but - Zardoz aside - Boorman was still a respected filmmaker who'd recently had both Best Director and Best Picture Oscar nominations for Deliverance.

On the other hand, yeah, he really did hate The Exorcist, which he called "child exploitation." He made it clear to the studio that if he was going to make a sequel, it would be a "corrective" against the first film. He didn't even want it to have The Exorcist in the title. In his mind, it should just be called The Heretic.

Somehow, they were still cool with hiring him, though they did insist on retaining the franchise name in the title - and then whittled away at his budget and the creative control they'd initially promised him.

 

[Douglas Bailey]

You want to talk bad performances, though, let's look at Richard Burton in Exorcist II.

Oh, give credit where it's due; he does all his own sweating!

 

[titch]

You want to talk bad performances, though, let's look at Richard Burton in Exorcist II.

Richard Burton turned in a few magnificent movie and Broadway performances, but his list of demented performances in wretched productions is a far more impressive achievement:

The Rains of Ranchipur (1955)
Seawife (1957)
The Bramble Bush (1959)
Ice Palace (1960)
The V.I.P.s (1963)
Cleopatra (1963)
The Sandpiper (1965)
The Comedians (1967)
Doctor Faustus (1967)
Boom! (1968)
Candy (1968)
Staircase (1969)
Raid on Rommel (1971)
Villain (1971)
Hammersmith Is Out! (1972)
Divorce His (1972)
The Assassination of Trotsky (1972)
Bluebeard (1972)
Massacre In Rome (1974)
The Voyage (1974)
The Klansman (1974)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
The Medusa Touch (1978)
The Wild Geese (1978)
Circle of Two (1980)
Lovespell (1981)

Exorcist II: The Heretic was possibly the crowning achievement of his very worst performances. His extraordinary technique of outrageous overacting was used to the full. I believe it was this performance, which moved Jay Cocks to write in TIME magazine: "Richard Burton, once an actor, now performs mainly as a buffoon".

As in Showgirls, the dialogue is hysterical. Every line Burton utters, is a classic. "Kokomo can help me find Pazuzu!" "I flew with Pazuzu - in a trance. It's difficult to explain. I was under hypnosis." "Pazuzu, king of the evil spirits of the air, help me to find Kokumo!" "Don't you understand... that I was face to face with the Evil that's inside her. Your machine has proved scientifically that there's an ancient demon locked within her!" etc. etc.

 

[Jack P]

"Cleopatra" I think deserves an asterisk because after reading the original shooting script, I feel both he and Taylor were done wrong by the cuts that took out a great deal of material that would have allowed us to see their performances in a different light. The way the film was finally cut made Burton suffer the worst, coming off as an art-imitating-life besotted idiot. Even so, I much prefer him in "Cleopatra" to "The Robe" which honestly looks worse and worse to me every time I revisit it.

 

[titch]

"Cleopatra" I think deserves an asterisk because after reading the original shooting script, I feel both he and Taylor were done wrong by the cuts that took out a great deal of material that would have allowed us to see their performances in a different light. The way the film was finally cut made Burton suffer the worst, coming off as an art-imitating-life besotted idiot. Even so, I much prefer him in "Cleopatra" to "The Robe" which honestly looks worse and worse to me every time I revisit it.

The Robe is also a dreadful movie. As legendary film critic Kim Newman wrote in EMPIRE: "The Robe typifies the worst aspects of the Hollywood Christian epic: performances which are either stiff or demented, enormous pageantry and spectacle just stuck unmoving on the screen, appalling dialogue delivered by actors who know they’re onto a loser and, worst of all, a stultifying religiosity that deadens even the camp enjoyment factor....It has some minor swordfights, but little action – the ridiculous climax has Rich and Jean walking meekly away to be martyred by arrows as the music swells into huge hallelujahs."

I don't think Rich had much dialogue or scenery to chew on, though.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

So, of course, he was the natural choice to hire to make a sequel.

I don't recall the entire story of how they ended up with Boorman directing it, but pretty sure he was not among the top two or three people they tried to get to direct it. I think 3 people (maybe more) turned down the job before it got to him. There were two things about it, one was it was a time when sequels were pretty much frowned upon by most directors and two, people felt Friedkin's film was so powerful, they did not want to try to follow it up.

I think Boorman also said no, at first, at which point they were in a bit of a panic. Boorman, I think, told them he did not want to make a film where the devil tortures a child for two hours and if he were to make it, the child in the film was going to be all goodness and light. Which is how Blair's character is designed, in a pretty saccharine manner. They had to let him do that though because otherwise, he would have walked.

Hence all the rewriting Kevin mentions.

I think you are right though, that when you are hiring a guy to direct a sequel and he tells you that he hates the film he is making a sequel for and that film was wildly successful...well...they probably should have moved on to someone else.

I love Boorman, loved Zardoz even, Exorcist II is his worst film by far, but I do think that is a matter of he was trying to do something that really was not going to work and had nothing to do really with what the first film was about. He creates some great visuals in Exorcist II, really stuff nobody else would ever have done, but yeah, he does not have a story that works nor is of great interest nor that really fits with the first film.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

To me, the pairing with this film has always been Friedkin's The Guardian, which is another disaster of a horror film that just never comes together. There are some interesting ideas here and there, but mostly, like Exorcist II it is a mess.

It is kind of horribly fascinating to sit through the two films, very much in a car crash way, but they are both bad films that start with bad stories, and then meander to a conclusion through a swamp of stinking misguided intentions.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

Bad scripts are the main similarities. No director has ever delivered a good film with a lousy script. There are examples of directors changing and rewriting the script daily during filming (Steven Spielberg on Jaws, Stanley Kubrick on The Shining, Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now! but these are exceptions that prove the rule).

Showgirls is a prime example of films which come into being because there is way too much money being thrown around by film studio executives and because a director is suddenly perceived as omnipotent (Damien Chazelle/Babylon, anyone?) . The flimsiest of ideas, written on a table napkin at lunch - "MGM-style musical...set in Vegas...strippers....sleaze....glamor" - was enough to throw $2 million dollars at and get the ball rolling. Paul Verhoeven was riding high after two enormous box-office smashes for Carolco (Total Recall, Basic Instinct) and was given free reign by the studio.

John Boorman didn't like the script for Exorcist II: The Heretic and the script was being rewritten on the fly during production. Most of the plans for location shooting were scuppered. The odd thing was, John Boorman had just delivered Zardoz, prior to being given the keys to Exorcist II: The Heretic. A box office and critical smash it was not. But the suits obviously thought that a quick sequel to one of the all-time blockbusters simply couldn't fail. Just proves "Nobody Knows Anything".

Pretty sure Boorman was a desperation hire. I believe they wanted a good director to helm the sequel but they were having a really hard time finding someone to do it. Boorman, I believe, they came to after others had passed on it, and yeah, he did not like the idea nor the original film. So, one of his primary goals in making the sequel was to present Blair's character as someone wonderful, someone just so full of warmth, love, and joy, that she was a force for good in the world. Basically, the opposite of how Friedkin used the character in The Exorcist.

I agree, it is a bad script, it does not hold together well, and is muddled about where it wants to go and what it wants to do. You start in a bad place with a bad script, no doubt, but Boorman should have passed on this film. It was not his thing. Due to the fact that The Exorcist was so huge, I am guessing they felt this sequel would be a massive hit. The Exorcist was Jaws before Jaws. It was an earth shaking blockbuster that caused the studio to clamor for a sequel attempt.

Like Jaws as well, it did not set up well for a sequel, at least not one that involved the characters from the first film. However, that tends to be the first and easiest path people want to go down.

The good aspect of Exorcist II is Boorman goes all out trying to create a visually fascinating picture, and he has some randomly good ideas in it. However, the Blair part of the story, all of it, is terrible. They should have dropped her character out of it completely. That's a trainwreck and trying to cobble together that horrible writing with Boorman's all out insane other ideas creates a real bizarre sort of conflict. It ends up making the film watchable, but not really in a good way.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

Exorcist II is a mess, but it's a fascinating mess.

Exorcist III is not nearly on the same level as the original film, and is quite different from it in many respects (for one thing, parts of it are pretty funny), but it's a genuinely good and interesting movie in its own right.

Yes, the third film had Blatty at the helm and it is basically a noir detective story with a horror twist. It does not go for the crisis of faith in the first film, and the bizarre metaphysics of the second. It has a cohesion of storytelling, and spins a quality yarn. It also has the good sense not to try to bring back Blair or the exorcism of a possessed child.

I honestly do not believe Boorman really grasped what the first film was.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

Richard Burton turned in a few magnificent movie and Broadway performances, but his list of demented performances in wretched productions is a far more impressive achievement:

The Rains of Ranchipur (1955)
Seawife (1957)
The Bramble Bush (1959)
Ice Palace (1960)
The V.I.P.s (1963)
Cleopatra (1963)
The Sandpiper (1965)
The Comedians (1967)
Doctor Faustus (1967)
Boom! (1968)
Candy (1968)
Staircase (1969)
Raid on Rommel (1971)
Villain (1971)
Hammersmith Is Out! (1972)
Divorce His (1972)
The Assassination of Trotsky (1972)
Bluebeard (1972)
Massacre In Rome (1974)
The Voyage (1974)
The Klansman (1974)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
The Medusa Touch (1978)
The Wild Geese (1978)
Circle of Two (1980)
Lovespell (1981)

Exorcist II: The Heretic was possibly the crowning achievement of his very worst performances. His extraordinary technique of outrageous overacting was used to the full. I believe it was this performance, which moved Jay Cocks to write in TIME magazine: "Richard Burton, once an actor, now performs mainly as a buffoon".

As in Showgirls, the dialogue is hysterical. Every line Burton utters, is a classic. "Kokomo can help me find Pazuzu!" "I flew with Pazuzu - in a trance. It's difficult to explain. I was under hypnosis." "Pazuzu, king of the evil spirits of the air, help me to find Kokumo!" "Don't you understand... that I was face to face with the Evil that's inside her. Your machine has proved scientifically that there's an ancient demon locked within her!" etc. etc.

I think Burton is completely and utterly drunk through all of The Klansman. It is a performance so mindblowingly bad it is hard to grasp, following that up with Exorcist II was one hell of a one-two punch to sink a career.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

Somehow, they were still cool with hiring him, though they did insist on retaining the franchise name in the title - and then whittled away at his budget and the creative control they'd initially promised him.

I think it was a deadline thing, they wanted to get the production up and running and had been turned down several times and were running out of time before they would have had to shelf it. I think Boorman did say no, and they negotiated him into doing it, because as you said elsewhere, it was supposed to be a big budget sequel that was meant to do big business, which likely would have opened other doors for Boorman.

 

[JoshZ]

I love Boorman, loved Zardoz even, Exorcist II is his worst film by far, but I do think that is a matter of he was trying to do something that really was not going to work and had nothing to do really with what the first film was about.

I also love Zardoz. It's s completely bonkers case of "What the Hell Were They Thinking?" on every level. Yet, if you take it at face value and accept it on its own terms, it's really fascinating and fun.

He creates some great visuals in Exorcist II, really stuff nobody else would ever have done, but yeah, he does not have a story that works nor is of great interest nor that really fits with the first film.

I think it's a mark of Boorman's skill that, as bad as Exorcist II is, the film's climax is so good that Steven Spielberg basically lifted it wholesale for the end of Poltergeist!

 

[titch]

Pretty sure Boorman was a desperation hire. I believe they wanted a good director to helm the sequel but they were having a really hard time finding someone to do it. Boorman, I believe, they came to after others had passed on it, and yeah, he did not like the idea nor the original film. So, one of his primary goals in making the sequel was to present Blair's character as someone wonderful, someone just so full of warmth, love, and joy, that she was a force for good in the world. Basically, the opposite of how Friedkin used the character in The Exorcist.

I agree, it is a bad script, it does not hold together well, and is muddled about where it wants to go and what it wants to do. You start in a bad place with a bad script, no doubt, but Boorman should have passed on this film. It was not his thing. Due to the fact that The Exorcist was so huge, I am guessing they felt this sequel would be a massive hit. The Exorcist was Jaws before Jaws. It was an earth shaking blockbuster that caused the studio to clamor for a sequel attempt.

Like Jaws as well, it did not set up well for a sequel, at least not one that involved the characters from the first film. However, that tends to be the first and easiest path people want to go down.

The good aspect of Exorcist II is Boorman goes all out trying to create a visually fascinating picture, and he has some randomly good ideas in it. However, the Blair part of the story, all of it, is terrible. They should have dropped her character out of it completely. That's a trainwreck and trying to cobble together that horrible writing with Boorman's all out insane other ideas creates a real bizarre sort of conflict. It ends up making the film watchable, but not really in a good way.

Variety reported crowd reaction to early screenings of the film: "Pic was laughed at frequently during the first L.A. area screening last Thursday night at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and on the opening day, Friday, patrons at the Hollywood Pacific Theatre actually threw things at the screen. Much the same response, laughter and booing, has been reported from around the country, where the pic is playing in almost 800 theatres."

John Boorman admitted: "Audiences were laughing at all the wrong things, and they created a kind of hostility. Theatre managers didn't want to wear their tuxedos. They were afraid of getting lynched. There's this wild beast out there, which is the audience. I created this arena and I just didn't throw enough Christians into it."

Boorman recut the film four times, desperately trying to placate the masses. But to no avail. It's only now, nearly 50 years later, that this absurd and preposterous film is appreciated by cultists as a camp classic.

 

[Jack P]

The Robe is also a dreadful movie. As legendary film critic Kim Newman wrote in EMPIRE: "The Robe typifies the worst aspects of the Hollywood Christian epic: performances which are either stiff or demented, enormous pageantry and spectacle just stuck unmoving on the screen, appalling dialogue delivered by actors who know they’re onto a loser and, worst of all, a stultifying religiosity that deadens even the camp enjoyment factor....It has some minor swordfights, but little action – the ridiculous climax has Rich and Jean walking meekly away to be martyred by arrows as the music swells into huge hallelujahs."

I don't think Rich had much dialogue or scenery to chew on, though.

My reasons for not thinking highly of "The Robe" are not the ones Newman describes. In fact, Newman gave the absolute rock-bottom worst "commentary" I have ever had to listen to with his annoying and offensive one on "Barabbas". He is the last person IMO who should ever be allowed to comment on any kind of Biblical oriented film with his snarky, disrespectful attitude toward people of faith and expressions of faith. My problem with "The Robe" has to do with the fact that as a Christian it is the most unauthentic depiction of the beginnings of the faith of any "prestige" Biblical epic film I've ever seen that isn't being overtly silly or campy (see "Salome" or "The Prodigal") or setting out to be deliberately offensive (I have one film in mind that I won't name). For instance, the fact that only in this account does there seem to be no such thing as a Sanhedrin or any role of Jewish opposition to Christ, only Roman. Not to mention the fact that Caligula never knew what a Christian was as the faith did not spread to Rome until the time of Claudius and Nero (making further ludicrous the sight of Peter in Rome) and even worse how Burton, the supposed embodiment of a new Christian utters a line that reveals Hollywood scriptwriting's fundamental ignorance of Christianity 101 in which he tells Caligula how the Crucifixion was a great "mistake" made by Rome. No real Christian who believes the Crucifixion was Divinely ordered for a deeper purpose of sacrificial redemption for mankind would ever utter a line like that. No, the reason "The Robe" is bad is because it presents a false version of the new faith written by people who don't understand it under the trappings of what they think is supposed to inspire us and Burton contributes to this deception with an awful hammy performance that is further undermined by the fact that he reeks of insincerity regarding his supposed conversion.

Alfred Newman's score and Jean Simmons are the bright lights in search of a better production.

 

[Kaskade1309]

Though it's often thought of and referred to as one of the worst motion pictures of all time, right up there with stinkers like Grease 2, I always had a soft spot for Boorman's The Heretic. It has to be taken for what it is, and appreciated for what he was trying to accomplish with it (it ultimately didn't achieve the latter based on audience and studio reactions). It's one of those films, like Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, that's so bad, it becomes good on subsequent viewings.

And at least they explored (dare I say even acknowledged?) the legend behind the actual demon that possessed Regan in the first film, Pazuzu, unlike David Gordon Green's more recent "sequel" attempt (from what I understand, the team behind that project is standing fast to the idea that our friend from Syria was not the entity possessing the girls in Believer, which in it of itself should have disqualified the film from being attached to the Exorcist franchise altogether IMO).

At any rate, I already own the Scream Factory Collector's Edition Blu-ray of Exorcist II, and there's really no need -- especially given the title we're talking about here -- to upgrade this to anything else, even if a 4K version came out. Both cuts on separate discs of the Scream package truly look fine for what they are, even though the mono audio tracks are kind of weak.

 

[titch]

At any rate, I already own the Scream Factory Collector's Edition Blu-ray of Exorcist II, and there's really no need -- especially given the title we're talking about here -- to upgrade this to anything else, even if a 4K version came out.

Only for obsessives, who want the new supplements: two new commentary tracks and the booklet It's a reasonably-priced (region "B"-locked) release. I'll wager that this will sell out, as it's one of Arrow's coveted Limited Editions.

 

[Kaskade1309]

Only for obsessives, who want the new supplements: two new commentary tracks and the booklet It's a reasonably-priced (region "B"-locked) release. I'll wager that this will sell out, as it's one of Arrow's coveted Limited Editions.

Fair enough, I suppose.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

Variety reported crowd reaction to early screenings of the film: "Pic was laughed at frequently during the first L.A. area screening last Thursday night at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and on the opening day, Friday, patrons at the Hollywood Pacific Theatre actually threw things at the screen. Much the same response, laughter and booing, has been reported from around the country, where the pic is playing in almost 800 theatres."

John Boorman admitted: "Audiences were laughing at all the wrong things, and they created a kind of hostility. Theatre managers didn't want to wear their tuxedos. They were afraid of getting lynched. There's this wild beast out there, which is the audience. I created this arena and I just didn't throw enough Christians into it."

Boorman recut the film four times, desperately trying to placate the masses. But to no avail. It's only now, nearly 50 years later, that this absurd and preposterous film is appreciated by cultists as a camp classic.

I have to think that people who saw The Exorcist and then went to see this would have been totally perplexed by it. A lot of Blair's scenes are totally ridiculous and laughable. The film is never scary and seems to not really be trying to be scary. Which, I assume was somewhat intentional since Boorman was trying to do the opposite of what Friedkin's film did. I did not see this in a theater. The first time I saw it was either a TV showing or on VHS. I was stunned by how bad it was and what I recall about it was that it was one of the films during that decade that proved doing sequels was a bad idea.

I'll have to go give the Boorman commentary a listen, I think I did once but I can't recall any of what he said right now.

I recall only one lynch party forming in a theater after a film, it was when I saw No Country for Old Men, when I walked out of the cinema a group had formed that were discussing going to ask for their money back because they felt the ending was a rip-off. They asked me to join them, they were angry, and I said I thought the ending and the entire film was brilliant, which they were disgusted by, and marched off looking for a manager.

I can see audiences finding Exorcist II horrible, it was pretty bad. It took me a few watches to appreciate what Boorman did, visually, because the story was just a disaster.

When I make lists of directors I love that have made some real stinkers, this, The Guardian, and Ridley Scott's Prometheus all make the list and those three films remind me of each other. The common thing tends to be they look nice but wow, the stories and acting in them are just awful and it is so bad you wonder, "Who thought this was a good idea?"

 

[Malcolm R]

I'm not sure I've ever seen this. I have it on the Exorcist collection blu-ray set. Maybe I'll do a franchise marathon for October's scary movie challenge.

Bad as it was, it still managed to break even or even make a small profit at the box office. Nothing close to the original, but the studio didn't lose money. And it's apparently still popular enough to have been licensed and re-released multiple times on various formats on home video, so it's still making money for the studio.