Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The sequels — or, in two cases, prequels — to “The Exorcist” have all been unqualified turkeys.
There is now a movement at hand to declare that John Boorman’s crackpot insect-swarm fantasia “Exorcist II: The Heretic” (1977) was some sort of misunderstood masterpiece, but that’s an act of revisionism every bit as loony tunes as “Heaven’s Gate” revisionism.
That said, the “Exorcist” genre has never left the culture. It has spawned successful pieces of claptrap, like “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” (2005), whose opening-weekend gross of $30 million in the dead zone of early September was more shocking than anything in the film.
Fifty years ago, the very essence of William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” was its obscenely eruptive, pea-soup-in-the-face, borderline-demonic-child-porn shock value.
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