director/screenwriter
William Peter Blatty
based on
his novel Legion
producer
Carter DeHaven
cinematographer
Gerry Fisher
music
Barry De Vorzon
editor
Todd C. Ramsay
cast
George C. Scott (Lt. Kinderman)
Ed Flanders (Father Dyer)
Brad Dourif (The Gemini Killer)
Jason Miller (Patient X)
Nicol Williamson (Father Morning)
Scott Wilson (Dr. Temple)
Nancy Fish (Nurse Allerton)
Grand L. Bush (Sgt. Atkins)
Viveca Lindfors (Nurse X)
Zohra Lampert (Mary Kinderman)
Samuel L. Jackson (Dream blind man)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 105m
u.s.
release: August 17,
1990
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
see also:
- the
exorcist
|
There are two major things
wrong with The Exorcist III and the way it was marketed
(there's a third, which I'll get to at the end):
(a) William Peter Blatty's
1983 book Legion should never have been made into a movie.
Blatty adapted it himself, so the blame for that falls on him.
Legion is a beautiful read, but it's essentially a philosophical
police procedural with supernatural elements. Not the stuff of
cinema.
(b) Having made a movie of
Legion, Warner Brothers should never have called it an
Exorcist movie. In the novel, the only holdovers from
the original Exorcist book and film were rambling Jewish
detective William Kinderman (played in the 1973 film by Lee J.
Cobb, and played here by George C. Scott) and witty Catholic
priest Father Joseph Dyer (played in the original by an actual
Jesuit priest, and played here by the late, great Ed Flanders).
But the studio wanted more of, y'know, an Exorcist flick,
so Blatty had to go back and reshoot scenes to include Jason
Miller, reprising his role (well, sort of) as the original's
self-sacrificing exorcist Damien Karras. Other "improvements"
to the film included a tacked-on finale involving another exorcist,
Father Morning (phoned in by Nicol Williamson).
The changes didn't help; Exorcist
III was largely ignored by audiences and sneered at by critics
-- though it has built a cult audience on video in the years
since, and has gained a shinier reputation among web critics,
some of whom go so far as to insist that it's better than
the original film. I'll call it a noble failure -- not nearly
as brutally effective as The Exorcist, and not as enthrallingly
mind-bending as Blatty's only other directorial effort, 1980's
The Ninth Configuration.
I'd read Legion countless
times in the seven years before the movie came out -- it's that
kind of book -- so a lot of the changes Blatty made in the film
rubbed me the wrong way. (This from someone who usually bellows
"The book is the book, the movie is the movie" whenever
some geek whines about minuscule changes made to a movie version
of something.) Kinderman's relationship with his sergeant sidekick
Atkins (Grand L. Bush) makes up much of the book's warming core
-- the men are deeply fond of each other, Kinderman perhaps seeing
Atkins as the son he never had. In the movie, we see virtually
nothing of their quirky rapport. An entire fascinating character
-- the neurologist Amfortas, who experiments with talking to
the dead via audiotapes -- is discarded, though, bafflingly,
the script includes a couple of allusions to the practice (which
Blatty reportedly believes in), in a Kinderman dream sequence
wherein angels attempt to communicate with the living. (Samuel
L. Jackson gets one line -- dubbed over by someone else -- as
a blind angel who complains "The living are deaf.")
Stripped to its basics, the
story is about Kinderman's pursuit of the Gemini Killer, who
died in the electric chair fifteen years ago but now appears
to be killing again. Blatty used this as a jumping-off point
for a grand philosophical theory of the very meaning and origin
of human existence (I won't spoil it, except to say that the
title Legion takes on a deeper significance). The movie
mostly loses all the Deep Thought, though we get an occasional,
pointless-seeming exchange about Pain or Evil. It seems pointless
now because there's no follow-through (maybe there was before
Blatty was told to go back to the editing room). Instead, Damien
Karras is shoehorned into the narrative as the unwilling host
body for the spirit of the Gemini Killer (played in his true
manifestation by Brad Dourif, in a chained-down spewing-psycho
performance that scooped Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter by
six months). Kinderman's trail leads him to various elderly mental
patients, which in turn leads to an admittedly exciting (if overblown
in comparison with the novel) sequence in which Kinderman races
to get home before an old nutcase (Viveca Lindfors), posing as
a nurse and carrying gigantic bone shears in her bag,
can liberate his daughter's head from her body.
It's too bad that Blatty was
so hamstrung by the demands of delivering "an Exorcist
sequel" (one hears that Paul Schrader faced similar trials
with his Exorcist movie -- he was replaced by Renny
Harlin), because he remains a superb director. The problem with
Exorcist III -- other than the obvious eleventh-hour finale,
which feels ridiculously abrupt and borders on the unintentionally
hilarious ("Now, Bill! Shoot me now!") -- isn't in
the way it's crafted. Blatty sets up one by-now-legendary seat-jumper
involving the murder of a nurse: I've never seen it done
that way before (or since, really), and the moment etches itself
into the pantheon of great horror scenes. In general, Blatty
maintains an eerie, oppressive tone without stooping to linger
over carnage (the more hideous crimes are merely talked about,
the corpses chastely cloaked in sheets). As he showed in The
Ninth Configuration, Blatty is masterful with sound, and
he and editor Todd Ramsay borrow William Friedkin's technique
in the original of clipping a scene just before you expect
it to end. The film keeps you off balance; it's strikingly well-made,
for a movie that shouldn't have been made.
Which brings us to the film's
third major problem: George C. Scott. Casting him as the
rumpled, benevolent ruminator Kinderman is like casting a Rottweiler
as a beagle. Scott begins each scene keyed up too high, and he's
simply too angry and animated to ring any bells as the man so
memorably embodied by the late Lee J. Cobb. Everyone else in
the large cast -- and Blatty certainly corralled an interesting
ensemble, ranging from Patrick Ewing to Zohra Lampert to Scott
Wilson to Fabio -- gets interesting bits of business and is allowed
to be human, but Scott is inhuman; he's not remotely credible
as a frail old man questioning our purpose in life. His big,
splenetic speech near the end -- which a lot of people love,
but I hate -- is not the Kinderman I know from the books; Kinderman
would never lapse into saying "I believe in slime and stink,
and every crawling, putrid thing, every possible ugliness and
corruption!" -- give me a break. Did Blatty really
write this? In the end, the only thing that can restore order
is Kinderman's trusty pistol. Scott is all too plausible spouting
off about "slime and stink" and then plugging the unholy
with lead; that's what finally kills his characterization and
the movie.
|