13 FOR HALLOWEEN #5: Witchcraft

Um. You know how I said in my last review that I’d find a better film for the fifth offering in this year’s 13 For Halloween? Basically, I’m a lying bastard.

How big a piece of shit is ‘Witchcraft’? Let’s subject it to the cinematic equivalent of the Bristol stool chart: David Hasselhoff is in it, and he doesn’t give the worst performance.

But before we interrogate the cast to find out who is the guiltiest, a word on the title. The opening credits of the copy I watched identified it as ‘Witchcraft’, with the subtitle ‘Evil Encounters’ in brackets. IMDb has it as ‘Witchery’. It was released in the UK as ‘Ghosthouse 2’, and it is in fact an in-name sequel to ‘Ghosthouse’, which was the UK title of Umberto Lenzi’s ‘La Casa 3’; the original title of ‘Witchcraft’ is ‘La Casa 4’ and it trades down Lenzi quite spectacularly for Fabrizio Laurenti (directing under the pseudonym Martin Newlin).

What it isn’t is the Rob Spera film ‘Witchcraft’ (released the same year, just to confuse things). Rob Spera’s ‘Witchcraft’ is a wretched PoS that launched a ridiculously long-running franchise – sixteen instalments, the most recent completed last year – where T&A is the entire aesthetic raison d’être.

Ten minutes into Laurenti’s ‘Witchcraft’, I found myself wishing I was watching Spera’s ‘Witchcraft’ or any of its execrable sequels.

Laurenti’s ‘Witchcraft’ starts with a heavily pregnant young woman being chased along a beach by several pilgrim-looking types. They’re carrying farm implements and dressed like they made the best sartorial effort possible to audition for ‘The Crucible’ but were crucially let down by their lack of thespian talent. The pursuit continues as the girl dashes into a beachfront hotel of far more modern construction than the historical period suggested by the costumes, an observation quickly compounded by the appearance, on one wall, of a fuse box. But still, this is swiftly revealed as a dream sequence, so I guess we can let the anachronism slide. The girl runs down a long corridor, occasionally stopping to try one of the doors to either side. All are locked, and she yanks at the door knobs and slams her hand against the timber of the doors with increasing desperation. But if you watch the scene closely (i.e. with your eyes open and a minimum of one synapse firing in your brain), you’ll notice that all the doors have a key in the lock. Every. Single. One. Yeah, I know it’s a dream sequence, but foxtrot foxtrot sierra.

Awaking from this dream is the also-heavily-pregnant Jane Brooks (Linda Blair), and because her waters could break at any moment, it’s deemed appropriate that she accompany her privileged but crotchety parents Rose (Annie Ross) and Freddie (Robert Champagne) to view a piece of real estate on a Massachusetts island that requires a boat crossing in bad weather. And because the trip won’t at all be boring for someone of his age group, they take Jane’s considerably younger brother Tommy (Michael Manchester) as well. Also along for the trip are nymphomaniac sexpot architect Linda Sullivan (Catherine Hickland) and junior partner real estate agent Jerry Giordano (Rick Farnsworth). No prizes for guessing that the property they’re interested in requiring for development is the creepy hotel from Jane’s dream.

It takes an interminable half hour to get these individuals to the hotel. Early scenes have the Brookses engage Linda’s services before they even visit the realtor to request a viewing (!) – the real estate appointment is hilarious, Jerry greeting them as “Mr Brook, Mrs Brooks”, as if he’d barely glanced at the script, couldn’t quite remember their characters’ surname and went for both iterations as if no-one would notice – while Jane is almost killed by a falling girder (it’s being lifted by a crane and swung across a busy city street on the opposite side of which is a construction site: health and safety, much?) and Tommy has a strange encounter with a woman in black (Hildegard Knef, slumming it). And yes, Knef’s character is literally referred to as “the woman in black” in a “let’s hope Susan Hill’s lawyer’s don’t get wind of this” kind of way.

Could the woman in black possibly be connected with the creepy hotel? Well, since Jerry’s sales pitch includes this humdinger – “they’ve got a lot of legends about this island: witches and rainbows and shit” – it seems likely. Though why she tries to kill Jane with the falling girder before the scene even shifts to the island when her nefarious plans are entirely dependent on Jane being at the island, I couldn’t rightly say.

Okay, we’ve just got two more characters to introduce, then we’re ready for the fun and games. Leslie (Leslie Cumming) – her character apparently merit a surname – is a virginal author who’s squatting in the hotel while she translates a German text on witchcraft. This probably made fifty shades of sense in the early script meetings. Joining her is horny photographer Gary (David Hasselhoff), ostensibly there to take the photographs which will accompany the text of a book Leslie hasn’t even started writing yet, but demonstrating more interest in introducing her to the pleasures of the flesh. Leslie testily rebuffs him at every approach.

So: everyone converges at the hotel, supernatural shenanigans ensure their passage back to the mainland is scuppered, and a fearsome storm lashes the island. At least that’s what the script says. In fact, it gets so bad at one point that Jerry’s father (Tony Cammarata), attempting a rescue mission, is foiled at a sea crossing and instead reaches the island by means of a helicopter. That’s how stormy it is. That’s dangerous the waters are. Now here’s a screengrab of the moment the helicopter arrives at the island. In the middle of a storm, remember:

This is the beginning of a five minute sequence in which the characters in the hotel try to attract Jerry’s attention, the helicopter buggers off after they fail to do so, and Gary and Leslie run desperately out of the hotel as the doors (mysteriously locked when the chopper appears) spring open again. It’s an integrated sequence and pretty much staged in real time. It begins at twilight, cuts in some searchlight shots filmed in total darkness, and concludes in broad daylight.

Shots that don’t match and lapses in continuity are par for the course in cheapies of this ilk, but ‘Witchcraft’ seems to take a perverse delight in presenting the audience images that are blithely at odds with what’s in the script. Take this shot, which plays off a discussion about leaving the island because the tide’s going out:

Boy, that tide sure has receded. You can barely see the water!

Or this one …

… where Gary tells a fully-dressed Linda, “Get dressed, we’ve got to leave immediately.”

Being charitable, though, these distractions did at least give me something to focus on other than the story itself, because – sweet baby Jesus in a mosh pit – ‘Witchcraft’ is pure 80s DTV boilerplate. There’s nothing remotely scary, creepy or even moderately tense on offer. Even the big scene where everyone desperately tries to get out of the house as the helicopter buzzes over the hotel, its searchlight not picking out a single sign of life, is robbed of any suspense due to Hasselhoff’s manic bounding from one side of the frame to the other, arms flailing and head jerking this way and that, as if hellbent on anyone else’s performance not being allowed to register.

Meanwhile, as characters fall one by one to the woman in black’s sinister machinations, Laurenti’s vision of the alternative-hotel they find themselves trapped in has all the raw visceral terror of a Duran Duran video. ‘Girls on Film’ maybe. Actually, the ‘Girls on Film’ video had more nudity than ‘Witchcraft’.

At 92 minutes, ‘Witchcraft’ is a long slog. One or two individual shots are competently composed, otherwise the overall standard of filmmaking is dire. The music doesn’t bear thinking of, let alone writing about. The script is garbage soaked in bilgewater. As for the performances, let’s bring this review back to where it started – Hasselhoff as not the worst in show – and end with the crimes against acting on display here. The verdicts are as follows:

Knef – career doldrums hamminess with enough self-deprecation that you know she’s not taking any of it seriously: charges dismissed.

Manchester – kid in a trashy film doing his best with what bad scriptwriters imagine is the way kids act: charges dismissed.

Ross – autopilot but not terrible: extenuating circumstances, non-custodial sentence.

Hickland – daytime soap actress required to do nothing but toss her hair and given the thankless task of trying to convince in a love scene with the wettest lettuce in the cast: extenuating circumstances, non-custodial sentence.

Hasselhoff – attention-seeking overacting: guilty, take him down.

Blair, Cumming, Farnsworth – utterly terrible, amateurish performances; general uncertainty as to the location of the camera in any given scene: guilty, take them down.

And finally our worst offender – Robert Champagne, a man whose surname is wonderfully at odds with his complete lack of sparkle onscreen. His performance isn’t just bad, it reaches a nadir – during one of the worst death scenes I’ve ever witnessed in all my years of watching trashy movies – where the film almost disappears into a black hole of Champagne’s single-handed creation. Guilty. Lock him up and throw away the key.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Savage Streets

‘Savage Streets’ is a film so sleazy you could almost be forgiven for thinking that, instead of adding it to the rental list, it had accosted you in some trash-strewn back alley. It’d be wearing a raincoat and puffing on a foul-smelling cheroot. It would have some teeth missing and sport a lot of stubble. Its fingernails would be dirty.

“Hey, buddy,” it’d say, “you wanna see sumthin’ fucked up and nasty?”

As a devotee of the Winter of Discontent season on The Agitation of the Mind, you’d nod and aver that, yes actually, you would.

“Rape/revenge exploitationer,” it’d say, by way of introduction. “Low budget, shot on the streets.”

“Hmmm,” you’d reply, non-committal. “Sounds like it’s been done before.”

“Yeah, but it’s usually some guy who’s out to avenge his wife or girlfriend, amiright? With me, it’s this hot chick in a leather catsuit tracking down the scum who raped her sister. And wait till ya get this! The sister’s a mute – can’t scream for help when they’re putting it to her. How fucked up is that?”

You’d respond that a scenario of that description was pretty fucked up indeed. You might also cast a glance about you to determine available exit routes.

“And then these fucktard scumbags,” it’d continue, snickering a little in a manner that puts you in mind of Muttley by way of Cthulu, “chase down the hot chick’s best friend and toss her off a bridge. Right before she’s due to get married. That’s some nasty shit, right?”

Again, you’d voice agreement that said shit was most certainly of the genus nasty.

“So the hot chick gets herself a crossbow and some bear-traps and it’s fuckin’ payback time. Know what I mean? Eh?” It would cough and expectorate into the gutter at this point, then turn its attention back to you, grinning dementedly. “Hey buddy, here’s the best part. The hot chick, yeah? The one in the leather catsuit? She’s played by Linda Blair. Y’know, the chick from ‘The Exorcist’. But she’s all grown up in this one. You know what I mean, buddy?”

You’d indicate that you did indeed comprehend the insinuation. You are, after all, both men of the world. The movie would open its raincoat – you’d raise an eyebrow that it was a VHS – and give you a flash of some lurid cover art …

… and you’d be sold. Linda Blair … exploitation flick … crossbow … bear-traps. You’d hail a cab and take it home with you and hope the neighbours didn’t notice. You’d hook up the old video player again and slide it in. You’d draw the blinds and crack open a beer. An hour and a half later you’d find yourself with mixed feelings, the only unambiguous one being that you’re in dire need of a shower.

‘Savage Streets’ ticks a fuckload of exploitation boxes – rival gangs, drugs, rape, murder, switchblades, crossbows, fast cars, nudity, rock ‘n’ roll – and there’s barely a frame of it that doesn’t ooze seediness. But for every genuinely nasty scene, there’s an unintentionally hilarious one. And for every five minutes of tense cat ‘n’ mouse or vicious revenge, there’s half an hour of tedium.

Let’s break down our raincoated friend’s selling point by way of example: this is a movie where the rape of her sister and the murder of her best friend motivate teenage girl gang leader Brenda (Blair) to embark on an orgy of violence. It clocks in at 93 minutes. The rape (crassly intercut with a shower room bitch fight between Brenda and her cheerleader rival) happens about half an hour into the film. The best friend’s murder occurs just shy of the hour mark. Brenda’s vengeful rampage lasts approximately 15 minutes. Using the formula a + b / c = x, where a is the time it takes to establish Brenda’s primary motivation for revenge, b is the time it takes to establish Brenda’s tertiary motivation for revenge and c is the duration of actual catharsis, you can discover the value of x (the ratio of fast-forwarding to running time).

For those viewers disinclined to approach ‘Savage Streets’ as a maths problem, it also serves as a time capsule from an age where fashion descended into a cocaine-fuelled absence of self-consciousness and the ozone layer was irreversibly punctured by the combined output of every teenager in the western world blasting industrial quantities of hairspray over their follicles. As reprehensible a movie as it is, arguably the most disturbing facet of ‘Savage Streets’ is its parade of mullets. I kid you not. Every freakin’ character sports the kind of bouffant ’do that makes Jon Bon Jovi circa ‘Slippery When Wet’ look like a shaven-headed thug.

And speaking of time capsule, ‘Savage Streets’ also gives us Linda Blair at twenty-five playing seventeen and looking all of twelve in the scenes where she’s meant to be at her angriest and most predatory. There’s something uncomfortable about watching an actress who looks so young strutting so much cleavage. And speaking of cleavage, Linnea Quigley – who I recall as being pneumatic in such erudite fare as ‘Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama’ and ‘Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers’ – seems positively flat-chested here.

There are entire screeds to be written on ‘Savage Streets’ – why it’s so scuzzy, why it has such longueurs, the precise nature of that interminable scene in the English Literature class, why John Vernon agreed to appear (my guess is gambling debts, although there’s always the possibility that he did it to win a dare) – but this isn’t the time. There’s a grubby VHS in a raincoat smoking on your sofa, getting ash everywhere and eyeing up your DVD of ‘Thriller – A Cruel Picture’. It knows you’ve got more beer in the fridge and it has designs on making itself at home. Spark its next stoogie, give it a can of something cheap and nasty, and kick it the hell out. Send it to chez Agitation; that sick li’l puppy’ll get a thousand words out of it.

The Scream trilogy

The horror film was in a moribund state in the mid-90s. The stalk ‘n’ slash genre had reached not so much its apogee (it never really had one) but a point of saturation the previous decade, endless ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ and ‘Friday the 13th’ sequels and equally innumerable micro-budget imitators adding up to a graveyard of stock characters and shopworn clichés.

Then along came Kevin Williamson and a whip-smart script loaded with post-modern irony which managed to have its cake and eat it by effortlessly operating within the very generic conventions it so satirically sent up. That script was entitled ‘Scary Movie’ (a titled later hijacked by for increasingly unfunny franchise of puerile comedies founded on spoofing a film that was itself a spoof … only in Hollywood!), and it found its way to Wes Craven.

Craven had the horror genre in his blood – he made his directorial debut with ‘Last House on the Left’, made the original, gut-wrenchingly tense ‘Hills Have Eyes’ and scored a massive hit with the first ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’. He revisited the franchise six films down the line with the much underrated ‘Wes Craven’s New Nightmare’, something of a precursor to ‘Scream’ in its self-reflexive approach to genre material.

‘New Nightmare’ failed to find an audience, however, and his follow-up ‘Vampire in Brooklyn’ fared no better. ‘Scream’ changed all that, giving Craven a career renaissance which only faltered with ‘Cursed’ as well as paving the way for a stalk ‘n’ slash revival headed by Jim Gillespie’s ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ (from a script by Williamson that jettisoned the ironies of ‘Scream’ and played the whole thing straight), which snowballed into the “torture porn” movement epitomised by Eli Roth’s ‘Hostel’ and saw virtually every key horror movie of the ’70s remade and eagerly gobbled up by a new generation of gore hounds (although not, and the power Christ compels Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes production from ever getting their mitts on it, ‘The Exorcist’).

‘Scream’ tips its hat to Craven’s most iconic creation, with the director himself appearing, in Freddy sweater and hat, as a school janitor (elsewhere, one of the high school students name-checks ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ as their favourite scary movie, adding “the sequels sucked, though”), as well as slyly evoking a panoply of classic creepfests. You’ve got the white picket fences of ‘Blue Velvet’, the tree-lined avenues of ‘Halloween’, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from ‘Exorcist’ star Linda Blair, and more video-store movie geek references than you can shake a knife at.

Better still, ‘Scream’ pays lip service to the interchangeable victims of so many slashers by having a smart and snarky cast – resilient survivor Sidney (Neve Campbell), sassy best friend Tatum (Rose McGowan), wiseass film nerd Randy (Jamie Kennedy), hardass reporter Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) and affable but hapless Deputy Dewey (David Arquette) – happily mock them even as the body count piles up.

The little matter of the killer’s identity (or did I put that apostrophe in the wrong place?) is almost beside the point. Plot mechanics, sleight of hand and a working knowledge of the genre are Craven and Williamson’s touchstones here. ‘Scream’ is a movie movie and as self-consciously cool as anything in Tarantino’s ouvre.

A sequel was inevitable. Let’s face it, which even moderately success horror film hasn’t spawned at least a couple of sequels if not a bona fide franchise? “By definition alone, sequels are inferior films,” Randy pontificates, setting off a film class debate as to whether ‘Aliens’ outclasses its predecessor or ‘House II: The Second Story’ represents the pinnacle of that particular saga. Later, he succinctly lays out the rules of the sequel: higher body count (check: it’s double the first film) and more elaborate death scenes.

A friend of mine believes that the slow start and theatrical denouement are deliberate ploys by Craven to pitch ‘Scream 2’ as a slightly less satisfying film than the original – a bravura decision if it that was the case. In my opinion, though, ‘Scream 2’ is the better film: the high water mark of the trilogy. And it works so well because of its theatricality.

Craven has stated that ‘Scream 2’ was specifically conceived as a sequel about sequels. But it goes a lot further than that. The plot has Sidney trying to forge a new life for herself and integrate into university (her drama teacher – David Warner in an effective cameo – encourages her to use art as catharsis by taking on the role of Cassandra in a student production of the Greek tragedy) while shadows from the past continue to plague her, not least Gale Weathers’ sensationalist book ‘The Woodboro Murders’ and its unsubtly-titled movie adaptation ‘Stab!’

‘Scream 2’ opens with a double murder at the ‘Stab!’ premier, the killings intercut with footage from the film which basically replays the opening sequence of ‘Scream’ (but done in deliberately naff exploitative fashion). Heather Graham essays the Drew Barrymore role and – later – we see Tori Spelling interviewed about her role as Sidney (a nifty in-joke, Dewey commenting in the first film that “a young Meg Ryan” would be ideal to play Sidney in the inevitable movie only for Sidney to muse that “knowing my luck they’d cast Tori Spelling”).

Sidney, then, is dealing with a kind of warped celebrity – one she doesn’t want. Cotton Weary (Liev Schrieber), exonerated after a year in prison for the killing of Sidney’s mother, wants the limelight: clearing his name is not enough – he views celebrity and the financial rewards that go with it as compensation for the year of his life lost to incarceration.

The killer wants their fifteen minutes of fame (or rather infamy): “I got my whole defense planned out. I'm gonna blame the movies ... This [the spate of murders] is just the beginning, a prelude to the trial … These days it’s all about the trial. Can you see it? The effects of cinema violence on society. I’ll get Dershowitz or Cochran to represent me. Bob Dole on the witness stand in my defence. Hell, the Christian Coalition’ll pay my legal fees.”

This, for me, is what kicks ‘Scream 2’ up a notch. If ‘Scream’ is a skit on the conventions of genre movies with the odd sideswipe at the media, then ‘Scream 2’ not only sends up sequels but raises questions about the media in all of its forms – reporting, publishing, cinema, theatre, the cult of celebrity – and how it disseminates horror as entertainment, as well as the audiences who lap it up, ie. us. That the killer delivers the rationale quoted above against the backdrop of the ‘Cassandra’ stage production makes it all the juicier.

‘Scream 3’, then, had a lot to live up to. Craven returned to the fold, but with Williamson busy on other projects scripting duties went to Ehren Kruger, working from notes sketched out by Williamson. With a name like that, he was pretty much destined to work with Craven. And while his continuation of the series is thematically in keeping with the previous instalments, it’s nonetheless disappointing that the whole trilogy couldn’t have been a unified writer/director collaboration.

Kruger’s set-up takes its cue from the film-within-a-film of ‘Scream 2’ and has the set of the in-production ‘Stab 3’ as backdrop to, yup, another spate of murders. Sidney takes something of a backseat, spending the first half of the film living in seclusion while dealing with memories/hallucinations of her mother. Meanwhile, Dewey and Gale are drawn into the escalating tensions on set, Dewey working as an ‘advisor’ on the production and dating the star of ‘Stab 3’, Jennifer Jolie (Parker Posey). Jennifer is playing Gale, and relations prove fractious when Gale herself turns up at the studio in pursuit of a story.

With the self-reflexive inclusion of ‘Stab’ already used to its fullest in ‘Scream 2’, and the under-use of Sidney leaving the film curiously devoid of a protagonist (the script never really settles on Dewey or Gale or any of the new characters as the focus of the narrative), ‘Scream 3’ doesn’t engage or cohere as effectively as its predecessors. There are a couple of effective set pieces and the Gale/Jennifer interplay makes for some spiky comedy, but none of this can disguise the fact that the series had simply run out of ideas by this point.

Sadly, it seemed to mark a downturn in the fortunes of its creative team. Craven and Williamson reteamed for the disastrous ‘Cursed’, which Craven followed up with the formulaic thriller ‘Red Eye’. Williamson’s directorial debut ‘Teaching Mrs Tingle’ (the original title, ‘Killing Mrs Tingle’, was subject to a hasty rethink post-Columbine) flopped. Much of his work as writer has since been for TV.

With ‘Scream 4’ in the offing, is there anything to be excited about – even with Williamson scripting again – or will the biggest scream be that of the flogged horse just as it expires? I fear part three has already proved that they tried to go an irony too far.

Exorcist II: The Heretic

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that all studios in possession of a financially successful property must be in search of a sequel. William Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’ made over $66 million in its first year’s release in America*, an impressive return on a total budget (including prints and advertising) of $15 million.

A follow-up was inevitable. Friedkin and Blatty were approached but refused. Retaining the services of playwright William Goodhart to script, co-producer Richard Lederer went scouting for a director. Initially, Lederer conceived the sequel as a quickie cash-in, perhaps even utilising footage from the original that didn’t make the final cut. Again a priest would be the central character but his role would be investigative, probing the circumstances of Merrin’s death. It would be low-budget and make Warner Bros an easy profit.

At least that was the theory.

John Boorman, who felt that ‘The Exorcist’ was little more than a film about the torture of a child, was an odd choice to direct, but Goodhart’s treatment piqued his interest. Goodhart wanted to explore the theories and theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and archaeologist on whom Blatty had based Father Merrin. Teilhard believed that mankind was moving towards an evolutionary stage where telepathic communication would engender global consciousness. This dovetailed with Boorman’s ideal that ‘The Heretic’ “would be the antidote” to ‘The Exorcist’ instead of a sequel; a metaphysical drama instead of a horror film. (It’s telling that Boorman’s autobiography refers to the film as simply ‘The Heretic’, pointedly leaving the word “exorcist” out of the title.)

So far, so dubious. A producer looking for a low-budget hit; a director who didn’t like the original; a writer in thrall to philosophical theorising.

It started going wrong with Goodhart’s first draft. Boorman wasn’t happy with it and states, in his autobiography that “long discussions were required to get him to change a comma”. Boorman and his writing partner Rospo Pallenberg did uncredited rewrites, the script undergoing almost continual revision as production approached. Originally, Kinderman had a prominent role; after Lee J. Cobb’s death, the script was rewritten. Main character Father Lamont was conceived as an idealistic young priest inspired by Merrin’s life and work; when Jon Voight, Boorman’s first choice, turned the part down, the script was revised to make him an older, world-weary character. Richard Burton was cast.

Linda Blair returned as Regan, but Ellen Burstyn had no interest in reprising her role as Chris. Accordingly, Kitty Winn found herself with more screen time as Sharon, formerly Chris MacNeil’s secretary and now apparently Regan’s guardian. Max von Sydow was convinced to reprise his role as Merrin (in flashbacks) even though he had tried to distance himself from ‘The Exorcist’ after it started generating so much controversy.

Blair, Winn and von Sydow are an auto-pilot throughout the whole film. Burton is magnificently indifferent to the material, barking his lines and scowling and looking very much like he wants to get off the set and into a pub as expediently as possible. Louise Fletcher, hot off her Oscar-winning turn in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ seems to have been cast for her resemblance to Burstyn. Paul Henreid, as the Cardinal from whom Lamont receives his instructions, mumbles his way through his few minutes of screen time. And pity James Earl Jones, reduced to playing most of his scenes decked out in a witch-doctor type get-up – the worst costuming since some doofus decided to put Sean Connery in a nappy/bandolier combo in ‘Zardoz’. (Said doofus was John Boorman, btw. Coincidence? I think not.)

In the six autobiographical pages he devotes to ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’, Boorman blames (i) illness, (ii) an overambitious script and (iii) Richard Burton for its box office failure. The prosecution wishes to re-examine in order to establish that: (i) Joseph Losey was ill during the filming of ‘The Servant’ and that film’s a masterpiece; (ii) unless “overambitious” is an accepted synonym for “incoherent”, this evidence should be deemed inadmissible; and (iii) Burton’s is certainly not the worst performance on display.

Let’s consider the issue of incoherence. Here’s my attempt at a plot synopsis. I use the word “attempt” advisedly. I’ve seen the film exactly twice: at a midnight screening double bill with its considerably more illustrious predecessor (I fell asleep during the mid-section of ‘Heretic’) and just a couple of days ago on DVD when I sat aghast through its two-hour running time, mouth agape and eyes bulging at the sheer, unmitigated, wanton, unapologetic, colossal, spectacular awfulness of it.

But I digress. The, ahem, “narrative” goes something like this: it’s four years since the events of the first film and Regan is now a pouting teenager living in a designer apartment under Sharon’s guardianship. She’s taking dance classes (wanna see the kind of choreography that makes your embarrassing uncle drunkenly strutting his stuff at a wedding look like Busby Berkeley? look no further) and attending sessions with psychiatrist Dr Tuskin (Fletcher). Tuskin is using a machine called the Synchronizer to link people’s minds and explore their memories, a supposedly ultra-high-tech bit of kit that resembles a mug tree with two lightbulbs strapped to it, which makes an incredibly annoying sonar-like sound every time it’s used (ie. for most of the first half of the film). Meanwhile, in a scene that contains two jarring WTF moments, Father Lamont is asked to investigate Merrin’s death. WTF moment #1: why is the investigation only now being opened, four years after the event? WTF moment #2: why does the Cardinal tell Lamont the church is considering Merrin a heretic for practising exorcism when the first film clearly demonstrates that it was not only sanctioned by church authorities but Merrin was actually asked to do it?

Lamont’s investigations bring him in contact with Regan and Dr Tuskin. Despite an immediate antagonism, Tuskin lets Lamont sit in on a Synchronizer session during which he witnesses a flashback/hallucination/vision (delete as applicable) of Merrin expiring at the hands of the possessed Regan of four years ago – who then reaches across time, space and all other logical barriers and attempts to stop Dr Tuskin’s heart. The good Regan of the present tries to comfort Dr Tuskin while Lamont dons a Synchronizer headset and goes into Dr Tuskin’s mind to rescue her from evil Regan.

I swear to God I am not making this up.

Regan begins to demonstrate otherworldly powers: precognition, telekinesis, faith healing. Lamont goes to Africa (or at least a few square meters of polystyrene rocks and an artificial sun hanging over a back lot masquerading as Africa) to track down Kokumo (Earl Jones), who was exorcised as a boy by Merrin. By now there is a telepathic link between Regan and Lamont so that when Lamont is set upon by an African tribe offended by his heretical religious views, Regan plunges off stage during her tap-dancing routine, giving a whole new meaning to coming out in sympathy.

To reiterate: I am not making this up. Nor am I under the influence of narcotics.

Lamont learns that Kukumo has the power to predict a plague of locusts (I’m laughing out loud as I type this) and can repel them by whirling his fist in the air. (Parenthetically, when Blatty saw a cut of ‘Exorcist II’, he informed the producers that he could, without changing a frame, come up with an entirely new plot, dub the film into a foreign language, subtitle it with his script and market it as a comedy. Oh, that they had listened!) There’s also something to do with good locusts, but I think I was trying to slit my wrists at that point and I might have missed something.

The internal logic of the film doesn’t just get lost at this point, it hails a cab, hightails it to the airport, books a one-way ticket to the Twilight Zone and gets wasted in the airport bar while it waits for the flight to be called. I don’t know why, but the finale has Regan and Lamont on a train back to Georgetown while Dr Tuskin and Sharon catch a plane to the same destination. These various parties converge on Prospect Street. Lamont is tempted by an adult version of evil Regan in a slinky nightdress who gives him the come-on …

No, really, I’m not making this up. Honest. On my mother’s life.

… while good Regan clings tearfully onto the stair rail as the house disintegrates around her. Lamont performs an exorcism which dispenses with holy water, religious texts and such piffling requirements as invocations to the Almighty and takes the more direct punch-the-evil-nightgown-wearing-Regan-in-the-face-a-few-times-then-rip-her-heart-out route. The plague of locusts turns up, Regan flaps a hand in the air and they all die. Sharon immolates herself. Tuskin blubs a bit. Lamont and Regan wander off and the end credits role.

Not surprisingly, when the film opened, audiences rioted, hurled abuse at the screen and demanded Boorman’s head on a plate. Fortunately, he survived and went on to make ‘Hope and Glory’ and ‘The General’. Both of which are good films.

‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ isn’t.

‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ is a piece of shit. A waste of celluloid that could have been melted down, reconstituted and used as condom wrappers; then at least paying customers could have got fucked in a good way.



*Since its original release in 1974, total worldwide earnings on ‘The Exorcist’ are in excess of $400 million.


SOURCES
‘Adventures of a Suburban Boy’ by John Boorman (Faber & Faber, 2003)

‘The Exorcist: Out of the Shadows’ by Bob McCade (Omnibus Press, 1999)

The Exorcist

In 1949, The Washington Post reported that a Catholic priest in Mount Rainier, Maryland, had exorcised a young boy apparently possessed by a malignant force or spirit. William Peter Blatty, studying at Georgetown University, read of the case a year later and became passionate about developing it into a book-length study. He managed to contact a priest involved in the exorcism, but church authorities denied him permission to discuss the events, citing the potentially traumatic effects on the boy should the case become widely publicised.

Blatty embarked on a career as a screenwriter and sometime novelist, mainly penning lightweight comedies. But the exorcism case stayed with him. In 1971, he published ‘The Exorcist’. Although ostensibly based on the actual case, Blatty made numerous diversions, both in terms of the circumstances surrounding the possession and the nature of the manifestations, as well as changing the possessed child from a 13-year old boy to a 12-year old girl.

Blatty’s first compromise came when his publishers stipulated a more ambiguous ending (Blatty has always been concerned that the ending of the piece, book or film, should emphasis that evil has been defeated, normalcy has returned and all is well). When Warner Bros acquired the film rights, Blatty himself wrote the first draft screenplay, bringing it in an unrealistic 220 pages (using the industry standard rule of thumb that a page of script equates to a minute of screen time, Blatty’s preferred script would have resulted in a four hour movie).

Various directors were offered the project: Stanley Kubrick, John Boorman, Peter Bogdanovich, Arthur Penn and Mike Nichols all turned it down. Kubrick simply wasn’t interested in the material, while Penn had teaching commitments at Yale. Both Nichols and Boorman were hesitant over casting a child actor in such a demanding role. Blatty lobbied for William Friedkin, even though the director had been openly critical of one of his earlier scripts.

Friedkin began whittling down Blatty’s screenplay, truncating (or even excising) entire screeds of theological discourse, and reducing the centrality of Lieutenant Kinderman (Lee J. Cobb). Still, his original 140-minute cut of ‘The Exorcist’ earned Blatty’s approbation. It was the changes he made as the release date approached and the commercial considerations of a 2-hour running time became paramount that caused ruptions between writer and director.

Amongst the scenes Friedkin cut wholesale are the now-legendary ‘spider-walk’ (although both agreed on its deletion, given that it would have freighted an already emotional scene with a double climax); a scene where Regan (Linda Blair) is checked out by her doctor (leading to discontinuity given an allusion in a subsequent scene to Regan being prescribed pills); a conversation between Fathers Merrin (Max von Sydow) and Karras (Jason Miller) during a lull in the exorcism; and, perhaps most significantly to Blatty, the original ending focusing on the developing friendship between Kinderman and Father Dyer (Father William O’Malley). This he replaced with a more dour scene in which Dyer, having bade farewell to Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) and Regan, glances down the vertiginous flight of steps where Karras plunged to his death, then turns and walks away, alone.

If Blatty found Friedkin’s aesthetic decisions controversial, they pale in comparison to his directorial techniques. The undisputed highlight is Friedkin’s treatment of Father O’Malley. A Jesuit priest, author and teacher, O’Malley had been hired as technical advisor; Friedkin then decided to cast him as Karras’s friend and mentor. Dyer’s big scene is his horrified and shaky administering of the last rites to Karras following his fatal plunge. A non-actor, O’Malley was unable to emote in front of the camera. Between takes Friedkin asked O’Malley, “Do you trust me?” O’Malley replied that he did. Friedkin hauled off and slapped the priest across the face, then shoved him onto the set to do the take.

Elsewhere, Burstyn and Blair sustain back injuries during physically gruelling stunt work; Friedkin discharged a blank round from a pistol to startle Miller for a key scene; and the sound effects for the exorcism sequence were blasted out at extreme volume on set without warning to create a tense, nervous, jumpy atmosphere.

The film opened to packed cinemas and round-the-block queues. Controversy was immediate. There were reports of vomiting, fainting* and miscarriages. Much was made of Friedkin’s use of subliminal imagery (the ghost face in Karras’s dream), however this is a very brief edit rather than something truly subliminal. As Friedkin inarguably put it, “if you can see it, it’s not subliminal”. True to the tendency of urban legend to attached itself to the film, this has been taken as a suggestion that there are subliminal shots in the film.

Evangelist Billy Graham went further, declaring that there was evil in the very celluloid. Why the devil would want to possess a few cans of raw film stock is something Graham failed to elaborate on, though it does explain a few things about the work of Michael Bay.

Mark Kermode’s definitive book (published as part of the BFI Modern Classics series) is essential reading. He discusses the “complex and contradictory” nature of the film, stating that in depicting the invasion of the abnormal into the normalcy of a white middle-class American home, the setting firmly rooted in a recognisably suburban environment, Friedkin pushed back the boundaries of what audiences of the time were comfortable with (particularly in terms of the horror genre, which had hitherto channelled its aesthetic from the gothic); and yet the good vs. evil narrative that ‘The Exorcist’ finally boils down to represents a highly conservative worldview “in which priests, policemen, good mothers and devoted sons” are the arbiters of what is right and sanctified.

Kermode nails it perfectly when he says, “It is in this tension between the progressive and the regressive, the divine and the depraved, the hidden and the apparent, that the power of ‘The Exorcist’ lies.”

The 2nd edition includes a transcript of a conversation between Friedkin and Blatty conducted by Kermode in 1998. Friedkin considers the film finished. Blatty – who has written alternative endings suggesting Karras’s resurrection/ascension – feels otherwise. Beyond the divergent visions of writer and director, beyond the very tensions that make the film what it is, ‘The Exorcist’ continues to haunt the imagination, permeate popular culture/consciousness and agitate the mind.



*The first time I saw ‘The Exorcist’, back when it was still banned on video in the UK, was at a midnight screening at a local fleapit. During the arteriogram sequence – a set-piece that is arguably more disturbing than any of the supernatural shenanigans – I bolted from my seat, weaved shakily to the gents and communed with the cold water tap for a minute or two.



SOURCES

‘The Exorcist’ by William Peter Blatty (Harper & Row, 1971)
‘The Exorcist’ (2nd edn) by Mark Kermode (BFI Publishing, 1998)
‘The Fear of God’ (1998 BBC documentary produced by Nick Freand-Jones)

PERSONAL FAVES: The Exorcist

The first time I saw ‘The Exorcist’, I was eighteen. It was 1990 and the film was still a good few years away from its video-ban repeal. One of the cinemas in Nottingham held a midnight screening – the Odeon or the ABC, I can’t remember which. Both closed in the last decade.

At eighteen, my interest in horror movies was at its height. Of late, and I know exactly why (it was called ‘Hostel’ and left me wondering why I’d wasted an hour and a half of my life on it), there has been something of a parting of the ways between me and the horror genre, particularly its vicious offspring the ‘torture porn’ film.

Thus the likes of ‘Captivity’, ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Eden Lake’ have come and gone without tempting me into my local multiplex.

Looking back through over 130 entries on The Agitation of the Mind, horror film write-ups only barely edge into the double figures: Romero’s ‘Dead’ sequence, a handful of gialli, ‘Freaks’, ‘The Orphanage’, ‘Tremors’ … that’s about it.

But I still enjoy a scary movie – there’s at least half a dozen on the personal faves list – it’s just that gore as a raison d’etre doesn’t interest me anymore. In context, as in John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’, viscera is a powerful aesthetic tool (oops, I’m straying into the kind of pseudy pontificating I started The Agitation of the Mind to get away from!). But it needs to be backed up by character and atmosphere or by the kind of psychologically-based terror that is so much more effective than any of Eli Roth’s graphic blood-lettings.

‘The Exorcist’ is a gore-free film. Sure, it has projectile pea-soup vomiting and the possessed Regan (Linda Blair) doing something rather irreligious with a crucifix, but the horror comes from its intelligent study of the nature of – and conflict between – good and evil.

And it delivers some memorably creepy scenes that aren’t supernatural:

* The wild dogs in frenzy as Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) gazes at the statue of Pazuzu in the Iraq-set opening sequence.

* Father Karras (Jason Miller) visiting his mother in hospital, lunatics grabbing at him as he enters the ward.

* A group of nuns walking along a suburban street as the wind blows leaves around them and Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ plays on the soundtrack (a combination of atmosphere, music and a sense of impending dread that always creeps me out).

* Regan – her mother still searching for a medical solution to her ‘condition’ – hospitalised for a brain scan. Not a hint of the otherworldly, but the harsh, clinical way William Friedkin films this scene leaves me feeling queasy every time I watch it.

* Merrin stepping out of a cab and pausing momentarily, silhouetted by a streetlight, before approaching the McNeil residence: a deliberately painterly image (the use of light is inspired by the canvasses of Rene Magritte), but hugely iconic.

This is perhaps the key to Friedkin’s genius*: this is a film about possession and exorcism, about the testing of faith by satanic evil, that is shot through with such documentary clarity that you can easily forget it’s a horror film. Perhaps, ultimately, it isn’t. But, importantly, it scared the crap out of me at eighteen, and it continues to scare the crap out of me now.



*Caveat: when I use the words ‘Friedkin’ and ‘genuis’ in the same sentence, it’s in reference to this film or ‘The French Connection’. Catch me doing it anywhere else in the Friedkin filmography and you’re more than welcome to leave a very vehement comment.