Their heads spun 360 degrees. They vomited up green sludge. They violently shouted curse words.
No, not the demonically possessed girls in “The Exorcist: Believer” — the awful movie’s furious audience.
After a promising start, the sixth film in a franchise that should’ve proudly called it quits 50 years ago becomes absolutely enraging.
With what’s billed a direct sequel to William Friedkin’s 1973 horror masterpiece, director David Gordon Green attempts to recycle the same formula that worked so splendidly in his 2018 “Halloween” reboot with Jamie Lee Curtis. And on paper, his plan doesn’t sound so bad.
Running time: 121 minutes. Rated R (some violent content, disturbing images, language and sexual references.) In theaters Oct. 6.
He pretends the terrible old sequels (“Exorcist II: The Heretic”) never happened. He brings back its brilliant original star (Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil) decades later. And he applies a more modern, familiar pace and style to a wholly distinct 1970s movie.
But a slasher flick — even the slasher flick, as John Carpenter’s “Halloween” is regarded — is one thing. “The Exorcist,” which was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1974, is very much another. Based on William Peter Blatty’s novel, it’s a far more complex and frightening creation that poses theological questions and features richly conceived characters. Cheapening it into an artless bore is downright sinful.
A scary beginning gives us false hope. Photographer Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) and his pregnant wife Sorenne (Tracey Graves) are vacationing in Haiti, and we see smart glimpses of the original’s Iraq opening — especially in how environmental sounds are used to spook us rather than manufactured effects or music. Then a powerful earthquake shakes the town and kills Sorenne, but Victor and the baby survive the disaster.
Thirteen years later, he’s a single father living in Georgia with a teenage daughter named Angela (Lidya Jewett) who misses her mom. So, she wanders into the woods with her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) after school, and they try to ritualistically summon her. Then they disappear for three days.
When the girls are eventually found with no memory of where they’ve been, they are — spoiler alert! — possessed.
From here, the film careens off a cliff into hell.
Yes, it’s nice to see Burstyn back in the Satanic saddle. But the actress, who’s still in peak form (she was phenomenal in “Pieces of a Woman”), is criminally wasted. She gets maybe 10 minutes of screen time and her role is reduced to that of a vague “exorcism expert.” She wrote a book called “A Mother’s Explanation” about her harrowing experience with Regan, so Victor begs her to help him save Angela. In an odd twist, she does not prove very helpful.
Once the girls unwillingly play hosts to the devil, “Believer” starts to look like every other interchangeable knockoff “The Exorcist” spawned, only blander and hardly chilling.
The exorcism scene — not scary at all, and I’m a wimp — turns into an audition to see which religion will get the job done. It’s a veritable “walk into a bar” joke. Will it be the Catholic priest (E.J. Bonilla), the hoodoo roots worker (Okwui Okpokwasili), the former novitiate nun (Ann Dowd) or Victor’s agnostic pleas for Angela to think of her mother? All the while Catherine’s horribly written, ultra-Christian parents (Norbert Leo Butz and Jennifer Nettles) are hanging out and behaving like idiots.
The original film was blessed by stunning performances. Beyond Burstyn, Jason Miller was haunting as Father Karas and Max von Sydow was the picture of fear as Father Merrin.
Nobody here is bad, but they’re all an afterthought. The roles are nothing, and so the acting’s nothing.
Remember a desperate Burstyn shouting at stumped doctors? Now the three parents act more politely concerned than anguished as their children are floating above the ground and ripping off their toenails. Dowd’s Ann is the closest the movie comes to an enticing backstory, yet the actress was far freakier on “The Leftovers” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
There’s a major cameo in the movie that will be a talker, but it’s nothing more than unearned nostalgia bait likely meant to set up the two planned, misguided sequels.
The power of Christ compels me to give “The Exorcist: Believer” one star.
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