Lessons not Learned - Exorcist II: The Heretic

Here’s a little something new for on here; I thought I’d take inspiration from Yahtzee’s little irregular column and every so often have a look at particular cases of a film crashing and burning, to see what could be learned from the mess, and evidence that it wasn’t.  I’m not going to do a full evisceration of a review of these films, as plenty of other smarter folks than I have done that.  No, I’m purely going to focus on cases where there were only one or two obvious factors behind the failure, and see if those crop up again with any subsequent major flops.  With this in mind, let’s start with one of the most notorious cases of sequelisation ever… John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic.

Yeah, this fits the tone the first one established.

Oh yes, there is so much that has been made fun of with this film.  There’s Richard Burton at his most… Richard Burton-y.  Linda Blair’s dancing.  That damn deathtrap of an apartment.  That locust costume that James Earl Jones has to wear for one scene.  The Nut O’ Fun.  But I’m less about technical matters as I am about story and tone, and that’s where I really want to focus all attention on.  Now John Boorman was a damn fine director; look at Excalibur, Point Blank, Deliverance, and you’ll see that.  But he is definitely one of those directors with his own voice, he has things to say, and no film sums that up better than what he made right before Exorcist II, Zardoz.  Much maligned, Zardoz is definitely a bizarre watch, but I will argue that it has quite a lot of merit, if you know what points it’s trying to make (plus again, it’s very solidly made).  It’s a soapboxy take on a lot of new age concepts, and BIG IDEAS, but it’s a fun soapbox.  So what happens when you take someone with a very, very distinct set of beliefs and ideas, and get them to try to make something that is based on a radically different set of concepts and beliefs?  A mess like Exorcist II, that’s what!

For those that haven't seen Zardoz, this happens less than five minutes in.  I actually do like this film!

The original Exorcist, both in the novel and the film, are very strongly Catholic stories, not just in use of the imagery, but in terms of the notions of good & evil, and the question of where is God in an imperfect world.  William Peter Blatty was very clear in that, and his later writings and films show the same worldview, and William Friedkin definitely got that too, as you can see in his Garth Marenghi-esque introductions on the DVD and Blu Ray.  The main creative minds on the project were both on the same page, so the film is unified in its goal, intent, and execution.  Now neither Friedkin or Blatty wanted to make an immediate follow-up to the Exorcist, so the first hands of writing the script went to a playwright William Goodheart.   It was he who is to blame for where things started to go wrong, as presumably when he found out that the character of Father Merrin was a little bit inspired by a real life Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he decided to incorporate a whole bunch of Chardin’s ideas into the story.  Chardin’s concepts are… quite radically different to that of traditional Christianity, mostly going around the ideas of goal driven evolution and humanity entering a sort of shared consciousness, so very much in the vein of the new age movement.  It was this that drew back in Boorman, who through more rewrites increased this aspect of the story more and more.

This trailer fails to prepare the audience for quite how much tapdancing the finished product contains.

Now notably Boorman was, on the strength of Deliverance, one of the first approached to direct the first film, but he turned it down, calling it “distasteful”.  So here’s the problem that sank Exorcist II: the main mind behind it didn’t understand or didn’t appreciate what made the first one a success, he thought that he was better than the original source material.  Thus the film he made is full of discontinuities to the original, undermining of the original, and stuff that’s just plain ridiculous if you’ve seen the original.  For example, in the original it’s clear that the main focus of the story isn’t on Reagan or Father Merrin, but Damien Karras, and when Blatty did his official follow-up to the original (which I’m certain entirely exists as a combination retcon and "fuck you" to this film), he followed that thread in a clever way.  Exorcist II pretty much pretends that the hero of the previous movie didn’t exist, and that his sacrifice (which if you’re pre-Vatican II is that of his very soul and place in Heaven) ultimately meant nothing as he didn’t do the job properly.  (Although Exorcist III subverts that idea in a very nasty way too).  Now oddly, the film does pick up on a few threads on the original, but not the right ones.  Notably, it makes clear that the demon at work was the Mesopotamian deity Pazuzu, which was hinted very heavily in the book… and it’s clear why the name wasn’t said on screen in the first film, because it’s a name that’s hard not to sound a bit silly when spoken aloud.  It also picks up on the hints that Merrin faced the demon before in Africa… and as much as I have issues with the way Iran was portrayed in the first film, Mr. Boorman, for the ridiculously stereotyped view of the continent presented here, you can eat a great big demon dick!

I actually do like the music from Ennio Morricone for this film... it's just a pretty long way from the first three minutes of Tubular Bells, isn't it?

Also, the whole tone is wrong; the first Exorcist was the jewel in the crown of the new wave of mainstream horror that had been growing since the release of Rosemary’s Baby, with great technical scares and disturbing ideas to back that up.  Exorcist II doesn’t seem interested at all in scaring the audience, more lecturing them about these new concepts, which I can sum up pretty much as “what if X-Men but for Jesus”.  As such, I can entirely believe the stories of audiences breaking out laughing when it was first released, as they were probably prepared for another experience in terror and got… something significantly different.  Now it is possible for a sequel to almost completely switch genre; look at Alien vs. Aliens, going from horror to action well, or how the Fast and the Furious has mutated into something very different from Point Break with cars.  But that was building on the established works properly, keeping on the elements people liked best, and worked well, which we’ve well established is not what Boorman was interested in at all.  Is it any wonder that it was a decade and a half before they decided to try again?  Seriously, Repossessed was a more respectful take on the original…

Amazingly Linda Blair had more dignity in this!  And the make-up is scarier than the one used for Exorcist: The Beginning!

The Lessons Not Learned

What should have been learned was simple; when making a follow-up or adaptation of a property which was a big success, and is well respected, the filmmakers should have a solid understanding of what made it a success.  I of course don’t mean just copy everything about the original, but look properly at what worked best about it, and consider how to bring that forward, or bring it to the screen in an adaptation.  If a work was a critical and commercial success, gaining a solid fanbase, it had to be doing something right.  Doing what Boorman did, i.e. almost attacking the original concepts and trying to steamroll them rarely ever works.  I can only think off the top of my head only one case where that sort of thing has worked; Paul Verhoeven twisting Starship Troopers into a perfect parody of itself, but even there it took understanding the original text to do that so well.

Remarkably, Warner Bros. let an even more wildly inappropriate director loose on an Exorcist movie many years later!

However, this lesson has not been learned, as there are lots of cases of various properties ending up as wrecks because what the makers of that sequel/adaptation/whatever just didn’t get or didn’t agree with the true strengths of the source.  For example, there have recently been interviews with Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich where they have stated that they weren’t too enamoured with the original Japanese Godzilla movies, so tried to make the monster in their version more of an animal, and not have any kaiju battles.  No wonder the Japanese went as far to do this.  Also, Zack Snyder, coming from the direction where he apparently thought that Rorschach was the hero of Watchmen, probably not the best person to direct more traditional superhero fare.  In fact, I’m going to go for the big one here; George Lucas clearly had a very different idea of what Star Wars was to those who grew up loving Star Wars; look where that lead!  Whilst filmmaking can often be a job like any other, where one doesn’t always get to do only the bits one wants to do, it should also be said that when someone is obviously not fit for a job, perhaps they should not be doing it.  And when you have a mishmash as profound in here, where those following up one of the most successful studio horror films ever have so low on their list of priorities “make something that’s at all like the first film”, perhaps it’s time to have a few words.