Exorcist II: The Heretic aka The Heretic aka The Worst Film Ever Made gets people excited for all the wrong reasons. The sequel to a film that didn’t need one, it was a fool’s errand by John Boorman, who directed it, then cut it about a fair bit after audiences started laughing at it in previews.
Today there are three versions. The original amusing version, the shorter theatrical cut Boorman delivered (and which still didn’t work) and then a re-edited version for European markets, which didn’t work all over again.
Poor Boorman never quite recovered from the drubbing it got. William Friedkin, who directed the original, said it was “as bad as seeing a traffic accident”. But then Friedkin, ever the showman and in love with the sound of his own voice, would say things just to stir things up.
But. Martin Scorsese liked it. The critic Pauline Kael had kinder words to say about it (“visionary crazy grandeur”) than she did about the original (“senseless ugliness”) and it was one of the favourite films of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Two out of three ain’t bad.
Boorman’s defence was that his movie was a riposte to Boorman’s, a pushback against “the darkness of The Exorcist”, which he thought was verging on child abuse in its treatment of its star, Linda Blair.
Who, let’s get to the movie, is back as Regan the teenager originally possessed in The Exorcis. Now a few years older and wiser, Regan is being played up to by an emissary from the Vatican, Father Lamont, who has been sent to investigate the death of Father Merrin, the priest from the first film. Lamont is an old-school believer in the presence of evil in the world. He rejects the progressive element in the church. The Devil is not a metaphor. For him it’s demons over science every time.
The fact that Lamont is played by Richard Burton is a coup. He brings a gravelly intensity to the role and gives a performance that feels committed, even though he’d subsequently claim he only played Lamont so he could finance his divorce settlement with Elizabeth Taylor.
Blair is again good at what she was good at in the first film – that stare is unsettling, even before the demonic stuff starts happening all over again. And she has a loose, girl-next-door quality that’s just what’s needed when the audience’s empathy needs engaging.
But, be warned, this isn’t quite the straight narrative movie the first film is. It veers semi-impressionistically all over the place, one minute back in the past where Max Von Sydow’s Father Merrin is once again chanting “the power of Christ compels you” over Regan’s possessed body (a body double). Then out in Africa, where James Earl Jones is playing the Leopard Man witch doctor who may or may not be the fount of evil. Then at the clinic where Regan’s shrink Dr Tuskin (Louise Fletcher aka Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) is using scientific methods to probe Regan’s unquiet mind. And, eventually, at the house where the original film played out, for a finale sequence in which Boorman eventually abandons all restraint and goes all in on the demonic.
There are far worse films. And though Louise Fletcher’s line readings are a touch flat, for your money here you do get some good stuff. An ethereal Ennio Morricone score. Burton and Blair, who play well off each other. James Earl Jones just before he became Darth Vader. Another chance to glimpse Von Sydow. Plus Paul Henreid – of Casablanca fame – in his final performance.
And, I kid you not, a tap dance sequence in which Regan hoofs it with fellow patients in a psychiatric ward. And a finale that’s off-the-charts mad. Good stuff. Some of it great stuff. Yes, there are far worse movies, far less interesting ones. The problem for Exorcist II: The Heretic is that there’s just no reason, earthly or otherwise, why it should exist.
Exoricst II: The Heretic (original version) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
