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As usual, horror and science fiction were well ahead of the curve on giving substantial lead roles to women.Īnd even if you hate The Exorcist II, you can probably appreciate that the excellent third film in the series, Exorcist III: Legion, only exists because novelist and screenwriter for the original film, William Peter Blatty saw Boorman’s film and thought it was laughable. Gene Tuskin and filled it with Louise Fletcher, still highly sought-after due to her Academy Award-winning turn in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Alien cast Sigourney Weaver in a role originally written for a man in 1979 but in 1977, Boorman took the male role of Dr. … James Earl Jones, a serious and well-respected actor, dressed like this and somehow still keeping a straight face.įourth, The Exorcist II beat Alien by two years in changing a lead male role and recasting it for an actress. The wacky follow-up also includes plagues of locusts, a very uncomfortable seduction sequence with Linda Blair as a succubus doppelganger, and… He tied the Regan possession into a previous possession Father Merrin encountered in Africa, showed audiences a biofeedback machine that could put people’s brainwaves in sync.
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Exorcist ii the heretic movie#
Third, this movie is BONKERS (in an entertaining way)! Building off the possession in the first film, Boorman and the film’s writers somehow found a way to incorporate a complicated metaphysical plot about human evolution. His dazzling visual style, insistence on unconventional stories, and narratives about men in spiritual and existential crises makes the second Exorcist film a perfect fit for his filmography. In a single decade, from 1972 to 1981, Boorman directed the backwoods terror of Deliverance, the trippy sci-fi of Zardoz, the New Age spirituality of Exorcist II: The Heretic, and the decidedly offbeat King Arthur film Excalibur. Second, while the film isn’t a great sequel to The Exorcist, it is a GREAT continuation of the daring career of director John Boorman. Films of that era weren’t automatically franchised, and it was John Boorman who accepted this impossible challenge. It’s not a coincidence that it took 23 years to get a sequel to Psycho, and Rosemary’s Baby has never had a filmic sequel. The brave soul who would take on that task had so many likely bad outcomes: being less profitable, retreading familiar ground, or even retroactively robbing the original of some of its power. However, the film can be a worthwhile, interesting, and possibly very fun one to the right viewer due to a few elements worthy of recognition.įirst, it’s amazing that the film even exists.īeing the creative team that followed up the groundbreaking, award-winning, highly profitable original was an unenviable task. As the 40th anniversary of the release of The Exorcist II: The Heretic arrives, it is tempting to remember the film only as a misguided sequel to a superior film that barely doubled its $14 million budget not so impressive, compared to the over $400 million made by the original.