“Boorman and the Devil” is a disaster movie that feels like a party. It’s a documentary about the making of one of the worst movies of its time, and maybe of all time — “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” the spectacularly misconceived and maladroit sequel to “The Exorcist.” It was a film so singular in its awfulness that when it came out in the summer of 1977, audiences laughed at it (they literally did), and the director, John Boorman, made a frantic attempt to recut it. (He lopped off the atrocious ending for a different atrocious ending.)
Talented people can make terrible movies, and the era of “Exorcist II,” when directors still enjoyed the carte blanche that had come with the power of the New Hollywood, was littered with ambitious bombs, from Steven Spielberg’s “1941” to Peter Bogdanovich’s “At Long Last Love” to the granddaddy of them all, the stiff-necked but aimless three-and-a-half-hour Marxist art Western “Heaven’s Gate.” “Boorman and the Devil,” written and directed by David Kittredge, is a dishy and fascinating inside look at how one of the most legendary duds of the ’70s came to happen.
Yet what lends the documentary its special, enjoyable flavor is that 50 years after “Exorcist II” was made, a number of the people connected with it, notably Boorman himself, still don’t fully grasp what the problem was. Boorman, seated in his wintry country home in County Wicklow, Ireland (he was 85 when the documentary was shot; he’s now 93), narrates the making of “Exorcist II” for us, and he still exudes a quality of shining belief in what he was doing. He made a movie so bad so that the audience felt no connection to it — but on some level of barely suppressed ego, he’s still blaming the audience for it. He thinks the film contains “some of the best work I’ve ever done.” He believes the problem is that the audience was expecting a different kind of movie. (Yes, a scary and not deathly boring one.)
You might call Boorman’s fortitude admirable, but you could also call it delusional. And it lends “Boorman and the Devil” the quality of a true-life Christopher Guest film. For this is the unintentionally funny story of what happens when utterly unhinged and high-minded hubris becomes your guiding light. Boorman, and others associated with “Exorcist II,” know that they made an infamous disaster, yet the reason the film was a disaster still eludes them. The documentary is full of lines that, in context, have a double-edged drollery, as when the director Joe Dante says, “Many of the techniques that he uses, I’ve never seen repeated again!”
Boorman thinks the problem with “Exorcist II” is that it failed to deliver the full-scale nasty horror blowout that the audience was expecting — and it’s true, that was a major problem. As Boorman acknowledges, this was all by design. After his success with “Deliverance” in 1972, Boorman had been offered the chance to direct “The Exorcist” (the original) but was repulsed by the book. “It seemed to me to be a book about torturing a child,” he says. “So I declined.” Three years later, when he was offered the sequel, Boorman said he wanted to make a movie that would be a mediation on the aftermath of “The Exorcist.” There’s no doubt that was his first mistake. No less a figure than Stanley Kubrick told him, “If you want to do a sequel to ‘The Exorcist,’ you just get more blood and gore.” This much was obvious.
But the problem with “Exorcist II: The Heretic” wasn’t just that it failed to reconjure the primal terror and gruesome gross-out shock value of “The Exorcist.” It’s that the movie Boorman made instead was at once lifeless and preposterous. Boorman, who came up through the British new wave of the ’60s, had made several gripping thrillers that are recognized as classics — the tight, mean revenge noir “Point Blank” (1967) and then, of course, “Deliverance” (1972), the middle-class-friends-in-the-hillbilly-wilds thriller that established him as an A-list force in Hollywood. But Boorman, gifted as he was, had a flaky pretentious indulgent side; he was in thrall to third-rate “mythic” ideas. (He has remained so to this day.) Boorman passed on “The Exorcist” to make “Zardoz” (1974), a dystopian mess of spaced-out Jungian sci-fi, with Sean Connery running around in a Chippendale’s version of a bullet bandolier.
It was this side of Boorman, the glittery-eyed “visionary” pedant, that enabled “Exorcist II.” The inspiration for the movie came from the French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who believed that the human race was getting ready to come together into a kind of cosmic telepathic hive mind. “That piqued my interest,” says Boorman. “It was an opportunity to make a film about, really, metaphysics,” as well as “the next phase of human evolution.” “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” Boorman decided, would be a movie about synchronized hypnosis, with Linda Blair’s Regan trying to deal with the trauma of having had the devil inside her by sharing the experience with her therapist, Dr. Tuskin (Louise Fletcher), and with Father Philip Lamont (Richard Burton), the priest assigned by the Vatican to investigate what happened to Father Merrin.
Here’s the thing about synchronized hypnosis. It’s one of those fruit-loop 1970s ideas — but more than that, it proved to be uniquely static as drama. “Exorcist II” turned out to be a movie about people sitting in a room staring at each other with wiry metal headbands on.
The film’s folly extended to the one-note stentorian badness of Richard Burton’s performance, as he intoned such classy lines as “E-vil…is a spiritual being.” It extended to the ruinously expensive but still fakey-looking re-creation of Ethiopia on a soundstage, with piles of dirt being blown around by wind machines, enough arc lights to threaten to set the place on fire, and boulders that looked like they were made of Styrofoam. And it extended to the film’s weirdly abstract portrait of the devil, which would now be embodied by…locusts! Great teeming swarms of them, with an occasional locust seen in big buggy close-up, and shots of flying from a locust’s-eye view (the Steadicam had just been invented). It all looked like a cheesy disaster movie called “Attack of the Locusts” (in fact, a killer-bee movie called “The Swarm” came out a year later. Coincidence? Maybe not). James Earl Jones, as the African scientist Kokumo, donned a giant locust head like a Halloween costume and for some reason spit a whole tomato out of his mouth. Even the film’s name for the demon was ridiculous: Pazuzu. Every time you heard it, the more it sounded like baby talk.
I saw “Exorcist II: The Heretic” the week it came out, and from the moment Linda Blair appeared, doing a smiley tap-dance for no good reason, through the orgy-of-destruction climax in what looked like a discotheque from hell, the film was staggering in its ineptitude. I left the theater shaking my head in disbelief. I had never seen it again until a year ago, and was unsurprised to discover that time had not been kind to it.
Yet even as “Boorman and the Devil” gets you chortling at how the bad decisions piled up, the movie also sells the idea that Boorman was working on the high wire, and that “Exorcist II” was a folly with shades of greatness in it. Several notable critics are interviewed (they include Bilge Ebiri, Joseph McBride, and my friend Stephanie Zacharek), and they all testify to the idea that there’s some sort of loopy grandeur to what Boorman achieved. With all due respect, I think this is a complete fantasy, but it takes off from what Pauline Kael said about the movie at the time — that its imagery had a crazy spellbinding quality. Kael had hated “The Exorcist” (her despairing review of it is one of her greatest pieces — an example of how she could be a peerless critic even when you disagreed with her), and her kind comments about “Exorcist II” fit a pattern of hers where she would pan a film that became incredibly popular, then go on to embrace the far inferior sequel, almost as if it was her way of getting back in the loop. (She did this with “Exorcist II,” “Ghostbusters II,” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”)
More to the point, in Kael’s comments on “Exorcist II,” you can hear the early stirrings of what would become Movie Disaster Rehabilitation Culture, which is now an industry among hipster cinephiles. Thus, the arid and didactic “Heaven’s Gate” has been elevated to the status of masterpiece. “Eyes Wide Shut,” which should have been about pedophilia (not aging swingers in masks), is now top-drawer Kubrick. And “Exorcist II” is a wacked but misunderstood grand folly. I passionately disagree with all three of those reassessments, and I think they’re all rooted in a certain impulse toward viewing movies in a postmodern way — as endlessly malleable texts rather than as stories that require an emotional logic and coherence that none of those films have. Wait long enough and even the worst movie, if it possesses the proper shoot-the-works ambition, can be “reframed.”
“Boorman and the Devil” honors John Boorman’s ambition, but it also cuts him slack, notably when he’s saying things like, “In my experience, successful movies have one thing in common, and that’s luck.” What a load! What successful movies have in common — along with luck — is artists who know what they’re doing, and are rooted in the real world, and are working at the top of their game.
That said, the making of “Exorcist II: The Heretic” was beset by a litany of bad decisions and bad luck, which piled up sky-high. Boorman got seriously ill with valley fever (from inhaling the imported dirt on set), and after he was hospitalized the production shut down for five weeks. The budget ballooned from $10 million to $15 million, making it the most expensive movie Warner Bros. had ever produced. Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg kept rewriting the script (because no one really knew what the movie was about), and Richard Burton was too dour and old and hungover. There was even an air of mishap surrounding the one sequence in the movie that’s truly effective — the dreamy moment where Regan balances on the edge of a rooftop with no railing. Boorman now acknowledges that the way they shot that scene (on the roof of the Warner Bros. building in New York), something could have gone very wrong.
The story of the film’s first sneak preview, at a theater in Pasadena, with the Warner Bros. executives sitting nervously in the back of the theater, is a hilarious parable of the chickens coming home to roost. The audience sat there, dumbfounded at first, and then you started to hear the giggles; midway through, a man stood up and threatened the people who made the film, at which point they escaped. “Exorcist II” had been booked into 700 theaters for 12 weeks (a nearly unprecedented wide release at the time), but the attendance declined by 50 percent in the second weekend. The word had gotten out. All the recutting in the world couldn’t save it. “Boorman and the Devil,” in its amused way, does try to save “Exorcist II: The Heretic” by treating it as an insane work of artistic daring. But I’m sorry, that’s just a pile of Pazuzu.
