The Exorcist III

The Exorcist III

List Price: $9.98
Our Price: $3.00
You Save: $6.98 (70%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.74 (click here)
Category: DVD
See more DVD details

DVD details

DVD Reviews of The Exorcist III

DVD Review: A Very Mixed Bag: Some Good Bits, Some Weak Bits
Summary: 3 Stars

This time indeed Blatty is auteur as well as author, taking over as director from Friedkin. He's not too bad for a beginner and can certainly do suspense. But there's a general sense of a writer being let off the leash and being a trifle self-indulgent. It's certainly all a bit too self-consciously literary for a horror movie. Thus in the first 15 minutes or so: we have a conversation between Kinderman and his police colleagues that is, for cop-talk, rather improbably peppered with allusions to `MacBeth', `Lord Jim' etc., as if Blatty were just desperate to show us, through Kinderman, just what an educated fellow he is; we have an, again rather self-consciously literary, visit to the realms of Kinderman's neuroses as he expands to his friend Father Dyer (Ed Flanders) about his terror of the carp back home in his bathtub; and we have a long conversation between Kinderman and Dyer about the Problem of Evil. Then, just as we are about to get really cross with Blatty, we have a dark and violent scene in a confessional box which is one of the most splendidly creepy and disturbing scenes in any modern American horror movie. Things seem to be looking up...

This mixture of occasional inspiration and a certain flatfootedness characterizes the whole film. Generally, it's a nice effective scary movie, though it's marred by some very significant flaws. (So it really is a battle between good and evil!) We could start with the title. There are more imaginative ways of naming sequels than simply II, III, etc. And `Exorcist III' suggests that we are getting a sequel to `Exorcist II'. Which happily we are not, as Blatty wisely simply ignores that rather silly (even by John Boorman standards!) film. Indeed I suspect he should have eschewed not only the `III' but the `Exorcist'. The connections with the earlier film are really pretty tenuous and contrived and Blatty would almost certainly have made a better (if less easily marketed!) film just by making this a free-standing new story. All this really has almost nothing to do with Regan McNeil and everything to do with the Gemini Killer. And indeed the determination to tie these things together leads to a certain absurdity as Karras's possession starts to seem a bit overdetermined: he seems to be possessed by the Gemini who is in turn possessed by the Demon from the first movie; metapossessed, as it were! And the Gemini seems not to be all that possessed, speaking very much in his own voice, far from buried like Regan before and Karras now, under the demonic persona. And why has the Demon bothered to possess Karras this complicated way dragging in this third party? We are told he wants to have revenge on Karras by having his body possessed by someone truly evil. But that explains nothing: as if the Demon wasn't evil enough in his own right. All this is just necessarily untidy. Then the scenes in the second half in room 11 where the Demon is faced down were presumably intended to recreate all the disturbing intensity of the parallel scenes in Regan's bedroom in EI. Which they don't: they are the lest effective part of the film. Partly again, this is Blatty getting carried away. Brad Dourif's Gemini is way too verbal; he explains himself far too much - unlike the original demon who explained nothing - and he ends up becoming unmysterious, not terribly scary and something of a bore. Indeed this general literary over-doing it remains pervasive: the Demon, on his very first appearance, has, quite unnecessarily, to quote a dirty great chunk of Donne at us.

If these scenes are the weakest bits, the strongest are mainly to be found in the first hour or so and far away from the fateful room 11. In this movie, the Demon is mobile, has found a way to get out and about, and consequently Blatty tries to convey in many of these early scenes a disturbing sense of unseen malign presence. This he does with great success and genuinely creepy results. Which makes this, at least some of the time, an interesting and worthwhile horror movie, even if, ultimately, it's more a movie with some great moments than anything like a great movie.

Description of The Exorcist III