The Exorcist: The Beginning

This is one messed-up movie. And I don't mean that in a good way. It's not Dead Alive messed-up, where you leave the theater laughing about how outrageous the gore gets. More like Renny Harlin got his hands on this material and really messed it up. He fills his movie with gruesome effects and loud, jarring musical cues, but can't come up with a single reasonable scare. Exorcist: The Beginning is really gross and often inappropriate, but never scary. Or even creepy. Just dumb and offensive, aesthetically and thematically. Probably one of the worst films of last year.



First of all, that's a dumb title. This isn't "the beginning" of anything. The story of The Exorcist begins exactly where the original film begins - with a girl named Regan being possessed by her imaginary friend Captain Howdy, who's probably Satan, or some other equally nasty demon. This is a silly story about one of the characters from that movie, set years earlier in another country, with nothing to do with anything else that's going on in the original film. It's got a possessed woman in it, but only for a few minutes, and even then, her possession and Regan's in William Friedkin's original Exorcist aren't particularly similar.

The story opens with Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow in the original, Stellan Skarsgaard here) taking a trip to Africa after receiving a very Indiana Jones-ish offer to explore a recently-discovered church. Merrin gave up the cloth after witnessing Nazi atrocities during WWII and now works as an archaeologist. He discovers upon arriving in Africa that the church was constructed to offset an ancient evil lurking within the land, capable of invading people's bodies and taking over their souls. Will he have to perform some sort of exorcism? Will he maybe redisocver his faith? Well, I don't want to blow the movie for you, but yes. Of course.

Harlin pretty much doesn't understand what made the original 70's Exorcist scary or popular. He seems to think it was the gross-out effects and the threat of harm being inflicted on a child. I guess it's possible some audiences got a kick out of Friedkin's willingness to subject his young protagonist to all manner of horror. But if you'll recall that film, Regan herself isn't really the target of any violence. Her body's invaded, she disappears from sight, and the demon taking her form inflicts pain and violence onto others (and, okay, occasionally itself). We see the demon attacking Regan's mother and the priests, but not Regan.

Now take Harlin's version. Almost all of the violence is committed against children. It's downright disturbing and not at all neccessary. In an early, startling sequence, a young child is devoured alive by wild hyenas, screaming for his life while the soundtrack bleats out flesh-ripping sound effects. Disgusting and pointless. Later, we see a stillborn baby arrive covered fetal head-to-toe with live squiggling maggots. In other sequences, children will develop seizures and vomit, will be threatened with all manner of knives and sharp implements, and will be shown in constantly repeated flashbacks being shot at point blank range in the head. Complete with blood spatter. What was Renny thinking?

This stuff's not scary and it's not good fodder for a Hollywood horror movie sequel. There are effective ways to use creepy children in a horror movie. See either version of The Ring, or The Sixth Sense or The Others. But constantly inflicting gruesome violence on them, violence without purpose or consequences, doesn't make me scared. It makes me sad. This is a film, like Event Horizon, that seems to lack a basic understanding of how horror films work - the threat of seeing something gross works far more successfully than the constant repetition of gross or stomach-churning imagery.

And about those Holocaust flashbacks. They're inappropriate. I don't mind using the Holocaust as a backstory for a character, or even briefly to highlight a particular message. For example, in the opening of X-Men, we see Magneto discover his powers as a child being led away by Nazis. It makes sense...he'll spend his adult life battling the forces of human intolerance through the use of his powers, which is nicely foreshadowed in that scene, enhancing the complexity of the film's central dilemma.

But here, the Nazism and Holocaust imagery is used without responsibility or purpose. It's just a random "evil" to explain away Merrin's loss of faith. And later sequences, in which a female doctor tells Merrin about her torture at the hands of Nazis in gruesome detail, actually managed to offend me. This movie's not mature enough to tackle something like Nazi torture, and it doesn't want to explore evil in that kind of philosophical manner anyway. Why not just come up with some other backstory? Why go that way? Just to seem edgy and controversial?

Again, let me reiterate, in the original Exorcist, the horror comes from the unnatural behavior of this young girl. She ceases to be a young girl and becomes an unholy demon, capable of impossible physical feats and atrociously evil verbiage. Harlin's version includes nothing like this at all. It's scares are based solely around disgusting imagery, bloody CGI effects and loud, jarring noises. That's it. It has no interest in exploring the nature of evil at all.

I don't want to waste too much more time on this crap, but I have one more point to make. The movie's so lazy, it can't even manage to maintain the same mythology from the original film. In the original film, everyone can tell that Regan has a demon inside of her because her behavior changes so greatly. In this film, the possessed individual remains silent and hidden until the climax. In the original film, the demon, once removed from Regan's body, must go somewhere else, and invades other people. In this film, the demon, once removed, simply disappears into thin air. In the original film, the demon manipulates the physical properties of the room around him/her in order to scare and distract the priests. In this film, the demon creates complete hallucinations that seem to swallow up characters whole.

Finally, the big turnaround at the end involving who's possessed contradicts everything that came before. I kind of wanted to turn this thing off after the first half hour, but I stuck with it. Too bad for me. I could have watched something else. Oh well...I saved all of you from having to rent this shitkicker.