CaptainHowdy.com The #1 Exorcist Fansite Since 1999
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I can only guess that the expected acrobatics would rip out the tubing anyway, and feeding Regan would be important than expelling the demon … ?
Thanks … so I wonder why the gear is absent from all scenes but this first visit from Karras … unless it was just for shock value. Last we saw of Regan, she was “beat up looking”, but next – post-crucifix abuse scene – we see of her is Karras' visit. He opens her door a crack and there's “the new Regan”, staring at him with feral eyes over that bandaged face. We are shocked at how degraded her condition has become since the crucifix incident. We, as well as Karras, are seeing the fully possessed Regan for the first time. But still, it seems like a gimmick because she's not wearing any gear during Karras' second interview, or for the remainder of the film …
Sorry, I don't know how to block. I can “Ignore” on the imdb film discussion forums, but I don't know how to block in Howdy…
Agreed. Beelzebub greatly exaggerates the film's failure as due mainly to Blatty's completely justified scorn. The damn thing wasn't sea-worthy from the get-go…
Thanks, Regan. I do concede some points to Beelzebub. They are somewhat trivial and I didn't include them in my reply, which I felt was lengthy enough to express my main objections. Maybe I can post some of my agreements with Beelzebub in a later post, however…
Sorry, Beelzebub, but the format in which you posted – some thirteen separate replies – makes it virtually impossible for me to answer each one (what a confusing mess that would be), nor do I wish to. But I’m “getting from you” an arrogance and smugness which is not strictly limited to your defense of Heretic– e.g., you’re always capitalizing “Granville” when you type my name (what an odd thing to be doing), as well as a superior, condescending tone to me personally, and not just to my views on Boorman and his film. These practices indicate a smugness unbecoming a newbie who has recently stated he knows he’s a newbie and doesn’t want a flame war. You see what I’m saying, BEELZEBUB.
Are you by chance, BBELZEBUB, a scientific materialist? Some of your remarks seem to indicate such, and they’re part of the smugness I perceive. For example, you take on a condescending lecturer’s tone when you attempt to dismiss religion, falsely insisting as unquestionable the proposition that the “real” world is matter and that the non-real world “where angels exist” is the opposite, which you erroneously term “anti-matter”. You seem unaware that anti-matter is not supernatural, and no scientist claims that it contains supernatural entities. In the case under discussion – demonic possession, exorcism, theological concepts in general – the opposite of matter is not anti-matter, but Spirit. You mix apples and oranges in an undisciplined and incorrect manner, and that skews your conclusions. Nor are your attempts to disgrace and discard the spiritual at all scientific. Rather, they are a mere surmise, an ideology, for the simple reason that materialism is not a given, scientific or otherwise: it’s a philosophy.
Worse, every time you are presented with eyewitness testimony to anomalies in “Robby’s” case, your immediate and consistent – “knee-jerk” – response is that all these witnesses are “lying” and “liars”. It’s as if you break out in hives when the supernatural or even the paranormal is discussed, to the extent that you insist that all such reported phenomena – and those who disagree with you must be lying or deluded. Apparently, in your universe, there are the Materialists (the Brights) and then there are the rest of us (the Dims). Sorry, but I am not responsible for your hyper-allergic reactions to religion, and I won’t be condescended to by a Fundamentalist Materialist.
All this is summed up in your self-aggrandizing chest-thump:
“I did an extensive research throughout many years. Learning everything there is to know about possession.”
Even experts on possession don’t take that arrogant line, any more than do scientists studying in a particular field. Apparently, you are in a class of your own. Moreover, that you did not learn “everything there is to know about possession” is revealed by the list of possession question points you posted for me, GRANVILLE, to answer. They are obviously derived from a parochial study of Catholic definitions. Not one of them is indicative of non-Catholic, non-Christian forms of possession. Moreover, you missed a an essential key point in Catholic exorcism that Boorman ran right over in his “I Hate The Exorcist” tank, namely, that knowing the demon’s name gives the exorcist power over the demon. In Boorman’s film, no sooner is Kokumo possessed than the demon stupidly blurts out to Merrin, “I am Pazuzu”, thus generously handing the name – and the game – directly into the priest’s hands. Your “deep research” completely missed Boorman’s colossal gaffe. Your claiimed “research”, based on the points you cited, presents itself as deeply flawed, inadequate, and incomplete.
Your habit of missing the target is again exemplified in your question, “did Father Merrin die of a heart attack or did Regan kill him? Again this is one of the many questions planted in the movie.”
As the film insists with the subtlety of a blow to the head with a truncheon: Merrin died of a heart attack. Regan had no reason to kill Merrin – she could have easily killed both priests had she wanted. Instead, she wanted to kill Regan, to possess her until “she lies stinking in the grave”. In that , the demon failed. You make a big deal of Regan’s hands being tied before Merrin’s death and untied after Merrin’s death. The film suggests that Merrin died of a bad heart. If the film “thought” Regan killed Merrin, Merrin’s corpse would be showing signs of a physical – Regan’s hands untied – attack … bruises, cuts, perhaps Merrin’s head turned backwards like Dennings’. No such signatures exist, nor are there any signs of a struggle. Moreover, when Karras is trying to revive Merrin, the demon is transfixed by the sight, eyes moving back and forth, mouth slightly ajar, in an indecisive manner, obviously waiting to see if Merrin had really died. Therefore even the demon didn’t know if Merrin was dead or not. This fact in turn indicates that Merrin surprised the demon by dropping dead, and that fact in turn indicates that the demon never tried to kill Merrin.
You wrote, “the movie was shot in an ambiguous style on purpose. And that the idea of leaving questions unanswered was also on purpose. He said Friedkin wanted the movie to have an “ambiguous†tone.”
Yeah, and then along comes “All-Thumbs Boorman” to destroy that beautiful ambiguous structure by supplanting it with comic book sci-fi, tinfoil hat theology, and a host of other insults to the intelligence. Good job, BEELZEBUB, you get The Golden Turkey Award for Bad Reviews.
In this post I’ve done my best to negotiate the Questions for GRANVILLE Minefield that you spread across the forum landscape. I can’t possibly reply to each individual item you posted, as you posted it. From now on, if you want my replies, please post one or two issues at a time in a single post so they can be addressed in a convenient and timely manner – one at at time, not en masse.
I'd love to get my hands on those first drafts of Heretic … originally it apparently even had a role for Kinderman, but Lee J. Cobb had passed away by then, so the story automatically lost one important character from the original story. Still, I'm very curious about what the film would have looked like minus all the sequential stupidities of Boorman's final product…
Thanks … according to Blair the first couple of drafts for Heretic were supposedly “very good”. But Voight dropped out, a bunch of re-writes ensued, and the final product is apparently much, much different from the original story. Too bad the original never got filmed. It's a little like Legion, where we have the “doctored” final product, while the semi-mythical, much better, original copy has been destroyed or is supposedly lurking under lock and key in some secret archive. The only difference of course is that “Legion I” had some filming done, but Heretic's early script(s) were never committed to celluloid, so I guess we'll never know how good Heretic could have been…
“Do you know what was the cause that made Blatty laugh? Which he immediately left the theater about 20 minutes the movie began. It was in the “synchronizer” scene.”
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As good a time as any to laugh and leave. The machine was ridiculous, as was the simultaneous “Merrin Agonistes” scene where the ultra-fake Blair stand-in crushes Merrin's heart while the Synchronizer does its thing. Blatty had the good sense to leave before he split a gut. The gizmo looks like something out of a combined Marx Brothers-Ed Wynn-Three Stooges production. In 1977, there was no excuse for such a silly looking clunker of a machine. 1967's Quatermass and the Pit/Five Million Years to Earth handled the idea of a telepathic headset much more believably and conservatively than did the ham-thumbed Boorman.
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“What about the spinning head in the first “EXORCIST”? Was that a true fact? NO. So William Peter Blatty is also a liar.”
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No. The full 360 degree head spin is not in the novel or the original screenplay – Friedkin specifically designed a Blair dummy for this single effect. The half-head spin, however, is humanly possible – it's been demonstrated on You Tube several times. The half-head spin appears in the novel, but even then Blatty leaves doubt about its literalness, because Chris sees it only after Regan has smashed Chris's head against a wall. Friedkin, not Blatty is the “liar” in this scene.
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“Blatty knows there is no such thing as “levitation” or “paranormal” occurences. Which again adds to the lies of the first “EXORCIST”. “
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No. Blatty is a big believer in the parnormal and has reported such events in his own life, such as a telephone receiver that floated up over the phone by itself while he was sitting next to it. His memoir about his mother, I'll Tell Them I Remember You, records several paranormal incidents.
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“what Father Walter Halloran says “
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It's a question of whom you want to believe. At least one other priest, plus “Robbie's” minister, and several eyewitnesses vouched for paranormal events in the original case. Blatty was not “lying” when he made some of these events part of the MacNeil case. Rather, Blatty conflated events from the original case with the strongest kinds of similar events from exorcistic documentation. This conflation is artisitic license, not “lying”, because Blatty took the incidents, and his paranormal research, at face value.
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“If “Exorcist 2″ went down hill so fast it was because of the un-professional behavior of William Peter Blatty in the theater.”
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Hardly. Probably most of the people in that particular theater did not even know that Blatty was there. Even if they did, you are taliking about a single incident in a single theater, certainly nothing significant enough to hurt the film in other theaters. I saw it in a podunk theater in the Pacific Northwest, where nobody knew or cared about Blatty's viewing, and they still greeted it with mocking laughter. Audiences went to see the movie, unaware of, and uncaring about, Blatty's opinion. The filmed bombed under its own weight.
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“Boorman was simply trying to answer one of the many questions that was left in the first “EXORCIST“, “what the hell happened between Regan and Father Merrin?”. “
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Except the question itself does not need to be asked. There is no suggestion in the novel or the Friedkin film that anything happened between Regan and Merrin. In the film, the last we see of Merrin is him holding Regan's hand at the bedside, while he starts praying the Lord's Prayer. The next we see of him, he's simply dead on the floor. Why did he die? Easy: we know, even from the opening frames of the film, that Merrin has a bad heart, that his symptoms are increasing during the exorcism (he's shown in the bathroom taking more nitro). Merrin dropped dead of a heart attack. There is no “burning question” about “what transpired” between the demon and the priest. The situation does not invite any questions whatsoever. That is why Boorman so perilously and embarrassingly out-stretched himself so thinly by inventing a “mystery” around Merrin's death.
Nor was there any mystery or question as to why Regan was possessed to begin with. She was not part of a new generation of holy people Satan was attacking via possession. Rather – and quite simply – Regan was selected for possession by the demon for the explicit reason of punishing Merrin. The demon intended to kill Regan before Merrin could exorcise the demon. The plan was to kill Regan while the failed exorcist Merrin looked on helplessly. Merrin unwittingly defeated the demon’s plan by dying prematurely, which in the novel utterly infuriates the demon.
Thus, the story is complete in itself. It needs no embellishment or creation of false mysteries.
Worse, Boorman compounded his spurious “mystery” by presenting Church prelates as so blind and stupid that they are accusing Merrin of “Satanism”. Merrin, one of the Church's greatest minds; Merrin, who successfully exorcised a person in Africa twelve years earlier; Merrin, who died in one last heroic attempt at exorcism … is now a SATANIST??? This is an insult both to the Church and the saintly Merrin himself … but the severest casualty is common sense.
The same thing is still happening to me. Some of my posts ARE turning up, but hours and hours later than the originating post.
Also I am continuing to receive email notification on ttopics I'm following.
So it's like the system is working, but is having trouble “accepting” posts in a timely manner …
Just because William Peter Blatty was the first to start laughing in the theater followed by William Friedkin does not mean John Boorman did a bad job.
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It's not the laughter that meant Boorman did a bad job. It is the cause of the laughter that means Boorman did a bad job. His film is funny on nearly level except intentionality.
