Exorcist: The Beginning English Movie
Oh horror of horrors! Didn't we put the "Exorcist" movies behind us years ago? Like the devil's advocate the series returns to haunt us... if not, at least to shake and stir us.
"The Exorcist-The Beginning" is like a trip back to an extremely unpleasant part of your existence that you'd like to forget, but can't because it won't let you.
It isn't such a bad film. But it doesn't evoke one tender thought about god. Nor does it make us seethe about the dealings of the devil. Instead it makes us wonder why the producers ever bothered to make this prequel to the 1970s film, which catapulted Linda Blair to diabolic fame as a girl possessed.
Girl possessed, producer obsessed. Why else would he take us back to the beginnings of Father Merrin who saved Regan's soul in "The Exorcist" but who saves this astute though pointless shiver giver from hurling into damnation?
Straightway, let's admit "The Exorcist-The Beginning" does manage to get its motivations and vision right. Shot in an African environment, the film emits the scent of backwardness bigotry and hidden terror. Despicable men with half-eaten faces, blood and gore oozing out of twitching corpses... Don't try watching this film with a full stomach.
The time is just after the Second World War. A disenchanted, cynical and troubled ex-priest Merrin, played with lip-curling disdain by Skarsgard, is sent to the African wasteland to grapple with the devil, or Lucifer if you will. Once there, the narrative kicks up a wild storm of devil-may-care disenchantment.
Some of the see-if-I-scare sequences are crafted in horrific detail. And you wonder why so much technical finesse should be applied to a flimsy far-fetched and obscure tale which attempts to bring together an entire range of discourse on the quality texture and content of evil, from pre-Christianity Satanism to Nazi atrocities.
"God isn't here, priest," say the devils' emissaries before they commit homicidal crimes. In its depiction of a dark and dreadful world of serious ethical fragmentation, "The Exorcist..." brings to the surface a compelling malevolence topped by a sequence where the doctor (Izaebella Scrupco) bleeds from places "where there's nothing to bleed".
More ghoulish still is the plight of two little African boys. One of them is devoured by hyenas while the other in hospital in a diabolic coma is all but slaughtered by his own tribesmen including his father.
The above sequence is shot to the sounds of heaving drums, as outside Merrin digs up the supposed graves of Jews slaughtered by Nazis. The two events are supposedly linked in the plot. How? God knows!
The plot is not just vague but also heavily reliant on the eccentric diabolic behaviour of the characters who often get up and do what you expect them to, namely, the unexpected. But unpredictability is not necessarily a virtue. In this case the director's vision is outweighed by the cumbersome thrusts of evil in the plot. After a while we're watching the shock value in specific sequences rather than a cohesive and complete film on the nature of evil.
Some of the performers seem surprisingly at home with the bizarre material. The horror genre has its own raison d'etre. Renny Harlin who's earlier directed some of the "Die Hard" films seems to be comfortable celebrating evil.
But are you willing to get into the chill spill? Haven't we had our fill?
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