Review of Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) by Kenneth H — 23 Apr 2010

Wow, this was a movie that completely fell flat. The heavily visual and enigmatic storytelling made for a totally bizarre and confusing movie experience; I could hardly understand what was going on because of all these random scenes and images - a locust flying, a leopard snarling, various other random visions - with no explanation or exposition. There are significant dream/visions elements here, but because everything is so crazy and confusing I could barely tell which scenes were real and which were dreams or someone's imagination.

The mangled carcass of a plot is ridiculous. For starters, why are they bothering to find out what happened to Father Merrin from the first film FOUR YEARS after his death? Shouldn't this investigation have occurred right after? And why no inquiries about the seemingly forgotten Father Karras, who died under similarly mysterious circumstances? Then this movie goes into all this mumbo jumbo about evil entities and what not. And now Regan's a psychic healer - WTF? That was a totally thoughtless, unnecessary and uncalled for direction to take the character in. The ending was weird and ambiguous. And we see swarms of locusts and some guy waving his arm in the air - are we really supposed to understand what's going on? I had to read the Wikipedia article to figure out what the hell was going on here.

This movie was clearly a very unnecessary sequel. The Exorcist was, at least by comparison, simple and brilliant, and the story should have ended there. Exorcist II essentially ruined it by continuing a rather un-continuable story. And it didn't live up to or share anything with its predecessor at all - it was silly and stupid rather than scary. I can see why people were reported to have been laughing at its premiere. If there is a redeeming quality, it's that it's an unintended comedy, a joke of a movie that's fun to laugh at.