CaptainHowdy.com The #1 Exorcist Fansite Since 1999
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Could another director have saved Exorcist II?
In a word, no. With a screenplay that messy, that had undergone that many rewrites, it was doomed from the outset. Boorman is a very good director and, had he been given a decent screenplay from which to work, he might have made a decent go of it. But the film never stood a chance.
As a bizarre, often very atmospheric, 70s sci-fi/fantasy film called The Heretic, I really rather like it. As a sequel to The Exorcist and bearing the title Exorcist II and all the expectations that name carries with it, it doesn’t stand a chance.
Some films are simply one-offs and can never have a good sequel.
The only chance that The Exorcist can ever become a proper franchise is for there to be a new adaptation of the book that’s designed to leave things open for more stories. The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin, stands alone by design and any attempt at a follow-up is doomed!
John Boorman is an excellent director. Look at films such as Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur, The Tailor of Panama and Hope and Glory for proof of that! Frankly, his filmography is considerably more consistent than William Friedkin’s.
Exorcist II was always a non-starter and the endless rewrites were partly a result of studio interference and partly circumstance: Lee J Cobb’s Kinderman had a substantial role originally, for example, and his death forced major changes.
I’m sure John Boorman, like it or not, feels the pain about Exorcist II as keenly as anyone. But it’s myopic not to acknowledge the many films he has made subsequently that were often very good indeed.
Exorcist II simply shouldn’t have been made in the first place and I doubt anyone could have done much with that screenplay.
There is mention that three people died in Regan’s room, if I remember correctly, but the failure to mention Karras is the key to a popular misunderstanding about the original film. Many people think the film is about Regan being possessed and that she’s the main character, while, in reality, Karras is the main character, the demon possessing a little girl to drive his wavering faith towards despair. Karras is the true exorcist who casts the demon out of a child who is merely a victim of an outside scheme.
Once Regan is saved, there’s no reason ever to see her again, let alone have her become a superpowered main character in a sequel.
There are aspects of Exorcist II I love. The African flashbacks are extremely atmospheric and, had they made a prequel purely about young Father Merrin in Africa starring Max Von Sydow, there might have been something in that. The opening with Ricard Burton in the church and the burning girl is also great until the jump cut to the burning dummy.
Exorcist II feels like a film made by people who’ve heard about the original, but never seen it, hence Karras is overlooked, since the basic imagery associated with the original in the public consciousness is Linda Blair in the bedroom and Max Von Sydow silhouetted by light from the house.
The wonderful thing about Karras’s character is that he is an everyman, so he doesn’t get an iconic image. His normalness, kindness and basic humanity make him what he great. So why would an unsubtle Hollywood sequel recognise someone whose power comes from how ordinary he is?
I don’t hate TVYNS, but it has too many anachronistic modern elements added. I don’t mind the additional scenes too much (the extra hospital stuff is boring though). I never had an issue with Chris’s remark about the doctor after Regan urinates at her party: I simply assumed she’d called out a doctor after the incident. The spiderwalk fails on every level for me: structurally it’s a double climax to the scene, it’s very cheesy and it takes Regan out of the bedroom. What works far better is seeing Regan strapped to the bed, yet Kinderman seeing her silhouette moving around the room from the street. The stairwell discussion is the only bit that really merits returning to the original release edit.
The additional ‘subliminals’ and overt CGI are what ruin TVYNS for me. The original edit has an almost documentary feel with a strong feeling of realism in the events. That’s why it’s scary. TVYNS is typically modern, in-your-face Hollywood. It’s all so obvious. Pazuzu flashes everywhere. Regan’s face morphing while hypnotised. Horrible!
I have no issues with CGI being used as a cleanup tool for better definition media – the fix on the dirty-looking jump cut as Karrasis possessed seems fair enough. It’s subtle and simply tidies up a problem that couldn’t be sorted at the time. Adding the flash of Karrass’s mother at the window is dumb though.
And for all TVYNS’s CGI excess, they ****still**** can’t paint out the piano wires in the levitation scene???
And the new sound mix with its new elements and various other changes is horrible too.
Sorry, but the TVYNS edit is a mess and not one I’d choose to see again. I’m happy enough with the 25th anniversary version with its sympathetic stereo mix from the original elements and basic clean-up.
I hope the new digital print will be based on the original release cut.
I hope it will see Owen Roizman sort out the colour timing too. In creating a new digital master from the negative, though, there will always be changes to the look. Remember, when you go back to the negative all the colour work and opticals have to be remade.
Also, the cinematographer would have given thought to what film stock the prints would ultimately be made on, meaning how much grain, colour degradation and so on would be introduced in developing that print from the interpositive. In other words, the negative (or what you see through the lens) isn’t necessarily indicative of how the film was intended to look on the cinema screen: the cinematographer would have shot with a film stock, knowing how it would look when it went to interpositive and finally what effect the transfer to a particular stock for the print would have on the look of the film. A digital master directly from the negative removes all those stages, which isn’t always a good thing.
I also hope the new master will include the original mono sound mix. A decent stereo version/5.1upmix from the original elements is fine as long as no extra sounds are added.
Also, just to prove I’m never entirely consistent, with this being such a high level restoration for Blu-ray and 4K TVs, I hope the jump cut in Karras’s death scene is still cleaned up and the piano wires, which will now become extremely obvious, are painted out, as they will become very distracting. Cleanup CGI is a fair enough tool in restoration. Cheesy morphing in a hypnotism scene is an unnecessary addition!
Interesting. The way I see it is that Karras (former boxer) essentially beats the demon out of the girl, the pissed off demon, thinking Karras has given up and fallen into despair, is tricked into taking over Karras (what better way to make people despair than a priest killing a child?) tries to make him strangle Regan, Karras wrestles back control for a moment and throws himself to his death, taking the demon with him. For whatever reason, this prevents the demon from returning to Regan, perhaps because Karras is a priest.
I prefer the Legion novel (and original movie screenplay) idea that Gemini subsequently occupied an empty vessel at the demon’s behest and that Karras himself had gone on to a better place. Hell, in the book, there’s some ambiguity as to whether Gemini’s vessel really is Karras’s body! Then again, as Friedkin says, audiences shouldn’t need everything described to them. Making room for interpretation and discussion is something I really miss in modern mainstream films!
Sorry, but The Exorcist in post-converted 3D would be awful. Better it be remade in Real-3D (with trendy gun-metal grey grading) than ruin the original film any more than it already has been by the Lucasfilm-esque enhancements of TVYNS. The only justifiable change I’ve seen used on any version of the film was the morphing effect on Damien’s possession sequence.
Friedkin’s film needs leaving alone now. Do a TV version, a 3D cinema remake or whatever by all means, but the original should stand alone as it is.
And I’ve been lucky enough to see the film three times in the cinema: once in a battered original print, mono sound, red Warner logo, no morphing, once in the stereo remix version, which added the morph to Damien’s possession, but inexplicably kept the piano wires lifting Regan, and TVYNS when it was released. I hope you guys get to see it in the cinema! 🙂
As Regan and Lamont are about to walk off after the locust swarm and the heart ripping, the Monty Python knight walks up to Lamont and hits him over the head with a rubber chicken. The End!
Captain Howdy said:
Agreed. If the play and this TV series are a success, a remake is almost inevitable.
It's a difficult one, because that means we don't want a TV show and play to be good, in order to prevent a movie remake. Then again, imagine the series is good and we get a Legion series to follow it, a movie remake will struggle even harder against a successful modern TV show and a 40-year-old film.
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I mean, I have to be brutal here (and I do respect Messrs Blatty and Friedkin) but why would a teleplay by Blatty, who hasn't worked in television in 30 years and hasn't made a movie in 20 particularly excite me? He's writing interesting books and we all know what happened with his original Exorcist screenplay and why William Friedkin had to get him to abandon it and start from scratch.
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And, speaking diplomatically, William Friedkin's most notable work in recent years had been recutting The Exorcist and messing with Owen Roisman's cinematography on The French Connection Blu-ray. He's not exactly regarded as the wunderkind he was 40+ years ago.
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A modern TV miniseries for cable really needs someone up and coming with a fresh approach to tackle it. I'll give them a chance and hope that Morgan Creek let the makers get on with their adaptation and not mess with it the way they did Legion and Exorcist: The Beginning/Dominion.
Actually, not too worried about this news. The choice of director is interesting and choosing to expand on the events either side of the novel is arguably even more intriguing. I wonder if they can get Max Von Sydow or Stellan SkarsgÃ¥rd as Merrin…
Face it: we knew a remake was inevitable. We could have had a Platinum Dunes job, but instead we have the director of Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene and a miniseries. There’s a chance that this, as a different adaptation of the book, rather than a remake of the movie, could be really interesting. On top of that, there’s the possibility of a Legion follow up!
I have no issue with a different adaptation for a different medium. Put it this way: if we heard this was a radio series or stage play, would we be up in arms?
There’s a chance this could be good. It might be bad. Did The Shining miniseries destroy Kubrick’s film? No.
If it’s rubbish, it’ll be forgotten. If it’s great, it can sit proudly next to my Exorcist movie Blu-ray. End of the day, let’s hope Morgan Creek leave the team alone to do a good job!
I got home late yesterday and found the Blu had arrived. I took a look at the theatrical cut (I’m not all that interested in the other version) and I have to say, it’s never looked better! The definition in the Iraq scenes was staggering and as it segued into the Washington DC scenes the improved colour grading was very noticeable. This is a film I’ve watched many times in the cinema and on DVD in both the original theatrical and the other version and therefore have a kind of subconscious awareness of where things have been changed. The lighting in the house seemed very different: much more naturalistic and, dare I say it, brighter.
I also liked the old-school subtitles on the Iraq scenes, as opposed to electronic, player-generated subs that have been the bane of so many DVD releases of movies down the years!
I’ll post more after watching the whole film – Hey! I’d had a long day and been down the pub! 😉
Just another thought. The year 2013. Thirteen is the ‘evil’ number and The Exorcist will celebrate its 40th anniversary. I think a 3D theatrical release will happen regardless of what Friedkin says.
God! I really hope it doesn’t. 3D is an artistic abomination a lot of us can’t even watch, not just because we have good taste, but also we don’t have the eyesight for it! Two people I know got migraines after watching Avatar. One work colleague’s girlfriend made it as far as an hour into the film, ran for the bathroom and vomited in the cinema lobby. Fifty years from now, when people are watching 2D movies running at 48 and 72 frames per second and some form of holographic laser visual medium is up and running, they’ll laugh at the millions of halfwits who permanently injured their eyes and caused themselves brain damage, developed epilepsy and so on, wearing crappy glasses with distorted vision films that lost forty per cent of their colour!
Look at all the 2D promotions for upcoming 3D movies: everything’s in focus. Everything looks flat. Camera movement is almost out of the question. Blatty’s Angel of Death moment in XIII? Forget it : couldn’t be done properly in 3D.
The sooner people realise that 3D is a gimmick little different from a fairground’s hall of mirrors, the better and Hollywood will forget their ridiculous flirtation with this inadequate garbage technology for anther 25 years! We had to put up with 3D crap in the 1950s and 1980s. Please God let this crappy time for cinema end soon!
Friedkin might have been all measures of wrong about things down the years, but in dismissing 3D for the creative cul-de-sac that it is he can even redeem himself for Jade, in my eyes!!!
Sounds great! The only modifications I want to the original are removal of the piano wires in the exorcism scene (horribly obvious in HD) and the retention of the cleaned-up jump cut on the possessed Karras. They can do what they want with TVYNS: I don’t care for it!
The version of Fear of God on the DVD is an international one, removing the Mark Kermode links and anything positively identifying it as a British documentary.
Certainly, in the UK we got the full cut on the VHS, as it was straightforward enough to create for the tape version, but the DVD encode would have been international. There was plenty of room on the international release of The Exorcist DVD for the full cut had its presence been desired!
In don't get why people get hung up about the dating of Merrin's exorcism in Africa. I always assumed that he performed a number of exorcisms down the years.
Why does the exorcism in Dominion/E:TB have to be the one that went on 'for months' and turned his hair white? I assumed that that was a wholly different exorcism after the events of Dominion.
After a number of brutal exorcisms, one assumes that's why Merrin's health diminished so badly in the years between Dominion and the first film!
