angusjack

So one of the things that's disappointing for me right now about Xbox Live's movie "rental" service is I've seen most of the movies they offer. However there are some notable exceptions to that, one of them being The Exorcist II: The Heretic. Here's the lowdown on this little gem: in 1977 Warner Brothers decided it was high time they made a sequel to that studio's most financially successful picture of all time The Exorcist. Unsurprising they give the producers a virtual blank check to work with and hire then hot shit director John Boorman (Deliverance), who by the way hated the first movie. The character of Father Dyer from the first film couldn't return because of scheduling conflicts with the actor so now they bring in a washed up Richard Burton to play a new lead in Father Lamont. So as I kind of hinted at earlier this wound up as the most expensive film at that time in WB's history, so you know what that means. It as was a complete critical and comercial failure.


An intense scene here where Linda Blair gropes Louise Fletcher's (aka Kai Winn) breasts.

So obviously I wouldn't have typed all that up if I hadn't seen this piece of shit.

Yes I "rented" The Exorcist II. Yes I completely regret that decision. This is a toatl incoherent train wreck of a movie. Right from the begining of the film with the bizarre ethnic screaming in the credits followed by a posessed Spanish girl screaming "Porque!?!" to the end where we are treated to not one, but two Linda Blair's fighting for the affection of Father Lamont. The movie begins by jumping around bumbling the narrative but we get the jist. Father Lamont is a troubled man and follower of Father Merrin (from the first film if you missed it) and his writings. Regan is still posessed by the "air demon" pazusu. This is all learned through through a hypnosis device pictured above that creates a telepathic link between two people. Of course how this works isn't explained but I liken it to a hippie version of the Vulcan Mind Meld. Father Lamont confronts pazusu and decides it's up to him to save Regan so he travels to Africa to find out how to stop the demon. Along the way we meet Ecumenical Ed and James Earl Jones. We don't get any explaination of how to stop the demon. So Father Lamont travels back to America and uses the explaination he gets to stop the demon. No those last two sentences were not a mistake on my part.

Some choice lines:

"It was horrible - utterly horrible... and fascinating!"

"Don't hide behind science, you're better than that!"

"I've flown this route before, on the wings of a locust."

Oddly enough one of the bright spots of this movie is the cinematography done by Geoffrey Unsworth (2001: A Space Odyssey) which lets me segway into the other movie I saw this week, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut another movie Unsworth was behind the lens on.



First a note on Richard Donner himself that I learned from listening to the commentary track. He's crazy. That's not bad though because he's a good kind of crazy, like goofy uncle crazy. He obviously had a great love for this material and it shows in his comments. I really grew to respect him because it's clear that he fought tooth in nail with the Salkinds (the producers) on this and got fucked by them when the first movie was a hit. He even talks about he and writer Tom Mankiewitcz would have gone on to make more and more Superman movies if they'd been allowed to (that's proabably a little bluster on their part but still disappointing none the less). Plus as I learned from his imdb profile not only did he direct one of my all time favorite kid's movies, The Goonies, he kept a miniture of the pirate ship too, so he gets cool points for that.



I guess I should start with the bad about the movie. It still feels incomplete. This was something hard for editor Michael Thau to overcome, becuase after all Donner only shot about 70% of the movie, but he did do as good as he could filling in with stuff from the Lester version of the film. Also the new effects in the added scenes, while trying to keep with the style of the films still look too new and are quite noticeable. It's a been a long time since I saw the original version of this but I remember enough of it and this is very different. If you really liked that film you may be very disappointed with this version.

The good, for me at least, is I really liked this movie (spoilers abound). The opening of movie begins with Lois figuring out that Clark is Superman, and there's a little goofy scene where Clark manages to buy a little time for himself and convince her otherwise. We also see the missle thrown into space from Superman The Movie breaking the Phantom Zone prison that holds Zod, Ursa, and Non and get a new classic Zod line "FREEEEEE!!!!" Another big change is the scene where Clark is finally revealed as Superman, here they used footage from the screen tests of Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder so again it looks unfinished. However it works very well. Here Lois pretends to shoot Clark (the gun is full of blanks) which forces Clark's hand as Superman, it's cool scene and Reeve and Kidder pull it off near perfectly.

The addition that really pleased me was the return of Marlon Brando as Jor-El. Here his perfomance soundly tops what he did in the first movie and it was completely cut from the originally just so the Salkinds wouldn't have to pay him! In this version Jor-El is the one who shows Kal-El how to remove his powers. We get an great scene where Reeve and Brando argue back and forth about Superman's responsiblility to Earth, it's fantastic character developement for Kal-El as he confesses his love for Lois and works so much better than the whinning he does to his mother in the original. Later when Clark/Kal-El returns to the Fortress of Solitude Jor-El sacrifices himself (or at least his construct does) reaching out and laying hands on his adult son for the first time restoring his powers. It's a fantastic scene and why it was cut boggles the mind.

The cut also elimnates much of the cheesiness that General Zod and his cronies had before. There is certain camp retained here though but again, a hard thing to remove through editing. All those goofy powers like that plastic "S" that wraps up Non are gone from the climax too. The end is quite a surprise. Instead of a magic kiss wiping Lois's mind, Superman once again reverses time which sort of makes up for the whole part where he kills Zod and crew as they get put back in the Phantom Zone.



As you can tell I really liked this movie. I truly think that if it had been finished by Donner at the time it would have been the best Superhero film ever made. But I can't deny it's incomplete as it currently is. I give 8 "Kneel before Zod!"'s out of 10.