Review of Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) by Jae L — 21 Jun 2009

This prequel to THE EXORCIST has its good points, but it's difficult to take seriously after the Ben Cross character who hires Fr. Merrin (Stellan Skarsgard) as an archeaologist in 1949 Cairo tells Fr.

Merrin a church has been discovered in East Africa circa 5 A.D. He means, of course, circa 500 A.D., as becomes apparent during subsequent dialogue, but nobody caught the flubbed line when it was made or re-looped it later.

How could a church have been built while Christ was still a child? Anyway, this film fills in Fr. Merrin's back story, related in THE EXORCIST of being a scholarly Jesuit who had performed an exorcisim in Africa decades before his climactic confrontation with the demon Pazuzu in Washington, D.

C. in the '70s. In this film, it turns out he didn't cast just any old demon out of someone in Africa, but -- wait for it -- Pazuzu, making the later conflict over the little girl a re-match. It should go without saying that adults and teens shouldn't watch horror films in the company of children, but this is especially true in the case of EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING, which pulls no punches when it comes to Pazuzu's cruelty to entire families as he lords over a (fictional) valley in Kenya where Lucifer is said to have fallen after being cast out of Heaven.