What’s good in The Exorcist III we can attribute to William Peter Blatty’s script and direction and to the cast, especially Brad Dourif and George C. Scott; what’s bad, to Executive Meddling — in particular the last-minute exorcism performed by a last-minute priest; it says a lot that Richard Burton’s Father Lamont from Exorcist II: The Heretic is more memorable than Nicol Williamson’s Father Morning.
Unlike The Heretic, III looks and feels (except for a bizarre dream sequence featuring cameos by Fabio and Patrick Ewing as angels) like it belongs in the same world as The Exorcist; that is to say, it knows the words and the music.
There are haunting visuals that stay with you long after the film is over (the figure on the crucifix opening its eyes, the old woman crawling on the ceiling, Scott’s daughter’s near decapitation).
At the same time, the film has a sense of humor that I would call shakespearean; Father Joseph Dyer (Ed Flanders), whose dialogue includes a reference to Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs, is akin to the gravedigger in Hamlet or the porter in Macbeth.
What bothers me about III is the same thing that troubles me about The Heretic (though to a much lesser degree), and it’s the ‘how.’ Specifically, how Patient X, alias Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), ends up in a cell in a hospital’s psychiatric ward for the past 15 years.
It was serendipitous to have X played by both Miller and Dourif (more so the latter than the former), because Dourif, as James ‘The Gemini Killer’ Venamun, has a long, loose-end-tying expository monologue that proves sometimes you can indeed polish a turd.
Mind you, it doesn’t, even after allowing for supernatural intervention, make a lick of fucking sense (the corpse of a beloved local priest bursts out of his “cheap little coffin” and goes missing, and no one is the wiser?), but it’s all in the delivery.
Dourif turns in a bone-freezing campfire tall tale that keeps you hanging on his every supernatural word (at one point he briefly reflects, “is this true?” — as if he finds it hard to swallow himself).
Now, I’m not saying Miller couldn’t have done this, but in retrospect I don’t see how he or anyone else could have; I only know Dourif did it because I watched him do it in a movie-stealing performance that doubled the considerable respect I already had for him and his craft.
One of the many things that make The Exorcist the greatest horror film ever made is that it has no use for the obligatory final shot suggesting that the evil will continue.
On the contrary, it ends on a hopeful, optimistic note; a welcome relief following the ordeal that we, characters and viewers alike, have just endured.
Unfortunately, Exorcist II: The Heretic carries on as if that obligatory final shot had been there all along. It’s not just that Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) must go back to dealing with Pazuzu four years after the fact — meaning that two good men died for nothing —; it’s how this reencounter comes about.
Once we accept the possibility of demonic possession, everything else in The Exorcist is perfectly plausible. The Heretic, on the other hand, comes up with a “synchronized hypnosis” device that leads to such ludicrous dialogue as “Your machine has proved that there’s an ancient demon within her!”
That this line is delivered by a frantic Richard Burton (who could achieve greatness with the right material) slumming it down in a throwaway horror sequel doesn’t do it any favors.
All things considered, the only heresy on display here is what director John Boorman does to the source material (in fairness to writer William Goodhart, his script was apparently rewritten beyond recognition) — I did, however, really enjoy the metaphorical use of locusts, which are shown to go from solitary and harmless grasshoppers to, well, Legion.
90% of Everything is Crap 