Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
Directed by John Boorman
Bizarre nightmares plague Regan MacNeil four years after her possession and exorcism. Has the demon returned? And if so, can the combined faith and knowledge of a Vatican investigator and a research specialist free her from its grasp?
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What critics compared Exorcist II: The Heretic to
I thrill to the robust strains of Ennio Morricone’s first original Western score in over three decades (which also samples his themes from The Thing and Exorcist II: The Heretic).
Elsewhere, Morricone’s original score is augmented by cues he wrote for John Boorman’s frightful Exorcist II: The Heretic and John Carpenter’s underrated The Thing (a tauter Kurt Russell thriller about snowbound, paranoid claustrophobia), while actor-musician David Hess’s haunting ballad Now You’re All Alone is photocopied in from the soundtrack of Wes Craven’s infamous The Last House on the Left .
The soundtrack was partially recycled from bits of his score for John Carpenter's The Thing and 1977's Exorcist II: The Heretic, but it still works perfectly against Tarantino's Old West backdrop.
No one should ever leave a movie and have the thought cross their minds of, “You know, maybe ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic‘ isn’t so bad after all.”
Bichir, who can be a wonderful actor when given good material (as in his Oscar-nominated turn in A Better Life), is boringly stoic as the sort of character that Richard Burton was smart enough to play for high camp in Exorcist II: The Heretic.
It’s a peculiar superpower of which the film never quite gets the measure: bath-tub terrors and in-briefcase battles are kooky fun, but action sequences in which Scott mounts flying insects smack of Richard Burton riding the wings of a locust in Exorcist II: The Heretic .
There are also dribs and drabs of Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and Se7en (1995), but in its heart of hearts, Deliver Us from Evil has a bad case of Friedkin envy.
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(See John Boorman’s 1977 film Exorcist II: The Heretic to understand what happens when that horror content isn’t there.)
Reckless follies are a gift from the movie gods, ranging from D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" to John Boorman's "Exorcist II: The Heretic" to any given five minutes of a film by Leos Carax, such as "The Lovers on the Bridge" or the recent "Pola X."