Of course, a two-hour film of paint drying would be better than EXORCIST II. EXORCIST III is better than a two-hour film of paint drying...marginally.
There are a few nice moments; the carp stuff is cute, and there are a couple of good eerie shots in the hospital. But ultimately, the movie collapses under the weight of a ludicrous and muddled plot, fairly awful performances (for which I blame the director; Scott would surely have done better if left to himself), and poor dialogue (notably Dourif's interminable monologue about how he possessed Karras's body, which could have been cut down to about five lines and been much more effective).
And speaking of Dourif, he should have been fired. Not for anything he did, but because once the studio had made its last-second decision to bring back Jason Miller, Dourif was superfluous. The character has Karras's body, it looks like Karras, why do we keep switching back and forth from Dourif to Miller to Dourif? Instead of rewriting the script, Blatty should have reshot all of Dourif's scenes with Miller in the role.
But I'm not sure how clearly Blatty was thinking while making this film (having never read LEGION, I'm not sure whether this logical slip occurs in the novel). Blatty uses the old trick of having the cops give out false details about crimes in order to distinguish a real confession from a false one. Kinderman comes to believe that current murders are being committed by the dead Gemini Killer because the killings have the look of the real Gemini murders, not the fake details which were printed in the papers.
However, we have already been informed that the Gemini Killer was executed. So the real details of the killings (which involve the mutilation of the bodies) would have come out in the trial. Remember the coroner in the OJ Simpson trial testifying in detail as to the condition of the bodies? Same deal.
So all a copycat killer would have had to do is read the trial transcripts--or even the news reports about the trial.
Blatty's final mistake (apart from making this film at all, of course) was to abandon the traditional, coherent Catholic theology which gave the original EXORCIST its extraordinary depth and power for a weird plot about one dead person possessing the body of another dead person (who apparently wasn't quite dead, because his soul is still inside his body, but who was dead enough that it took the first dead person [the one possessing, not the one possessed] fifteen years to repair the damage to his [the possessed person's] brain).
I am not looking forward to EXORCIST IV.
4/10
There are a few nice moments; the carp stuff is cute, and there are a couple of good eerie shots in the hospital. But ultimately, the movie collapses under the weight of a ludicrous and muddled plot, fairly awful performances (for which I blame the director; Scott would surely have done better if left to himself), and poor dialogue (notably Dourif's interminable monologue about how he possessed Karras's body, which could have been cut down to about five lines and been much more effective).
And speaking of Dourif, he should have been fired. Not for anything he did, but because once the studio had made its last-second decision to bring back Jason Miller, Dourif was superfluous. The character has Karras's body, it looks like Karras, why do we keep switching back and forth from Dourif to Miller to Dourif? Instead of rewriting the script, Blatty should have reshot all of Dourif's scenes with Miller in the role.
But I'm not sure how clearly Blatty was thinking while making this film (having never read LEGION, I'm not sure whether this logical slip occurs in the novel). Blatty uses the old trick of having the cops give out false details about crimes in order to distinguish a real confession from a false one. Kinderman comes to believe that current murders are being committed by the dead Gemini Killer because the killings have the look of the real Gemini murders, not the fake details which were printed in the papers.
However, we have already been informed that the Gemini Killer was executed. So the real details of the killings (which involve the mutilation of the bodies) would have come out in the trial. Remember the coroner in the OJ Simpson trial testifying in detail as to the condition of the bodies? Same deal.
So all a copycat killer would have had to do is read the trial transcripts--or even the news reports about the trial.
Blatty's final mistake (apart from making this film at all, of course) was to abandon the traditional, coherent Catholic theology which gave the original EXORCIST its extraordinary depth and power for a weird plot about one dead person possessing the body of another dead person (who apparently wasn't quite dead, because his soul is still inside his body, but who was dead enough that it took the first dead person [the one possessing, not the one possessed] fifteen years to repair the damage to his [the possessed person's] brain).
I am not looking forward to EXORCIST IV.
4/10