John Boorman admits that his "Exorcist" sequel is one of the most infamous debacles of the '70s. But he still doesn't seem to know why. 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. 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 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.
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