Exorcist: The Beginning

Posted by Greg

November 11, 2007

The Devil’s In The Details

**1/2 out of *****

I was lucky that my friends Dad owned a video store when I was a young lad, or I never would have been able to rent the original Exorcist on VHS when I was 13 years old. I was a scary movie veteran by this point, but most of them were B-movies that got their scares through cheap jump cuts and loud music. However, The Exorcist was the first movie that I saw that wasn’t just scary - it was disturbing. Falling to sleep after The Howling was easy; getting some winks after The Exorcist wasn’t so simple. Sixteen years later, I found myself sitting in a theatre watching the third sequel to the original and wondering when the exact point was that the franchise had been turned into my old horror staple, the magnanimous B-movie.

Famous in Hollywood for its bizarre production, this movie was actually shot twice. Original director Paul Schrader turned in a print that wasn’t gory enough; Renny Harlin (Die Hard II, Cutthroat Island) was called in to do re-shoots and ended up starting nearly from scratch.

Taking us back to 1949, Exorcist: The Beginning re-introduces us to Lancaster Merrin (Stellan Skarsgård), 30 years before the events in the original movie. A broken and faithless man after witnessing WWII atrocities, he’s met by a mysterious stranger who tells him of a recent archaeological find in Africa. On behalf of the British government, he’s asked to help lead the dig and solve the mystery of what they’ve uncovered - a Christian church that was there 1,000 years before Christianity ever reached that part of the world.

At the site, he meets a rather static cast of characters that both welcome and warn him. There’s the crusty, alcoholic chief archaeologist (Alan Ford), the naïve young priest-in-training (James D’Arcy), the native translator (Andrew French) and of course, the beautiful but mysterious doctor (Izabella Scorupco) who manages to walk around the desert in high heels.

After a while, tempers between the villagers and the Vatican/Army representatives start to flare. It seems the site has a mysterious past and recent deaths haven’t been the first that have been blamed on the mysterious church. Pretty soon, things start to go from bad to worse with suicides, savage hyenas, violent disappearances and enough scavenging crows to fill a house. Things come to a head when a young boy seemingly becomes the conduit for a demonic possession, and the confrontation between a man who no longer believes and the evil power he once fought to conquer is on.

The best thing about the movie is Skarsgård, an imposing and powerful actor who does a pretty fine job with the material he’s given. Close-ups of his stern face convey a sense of strength without having to say anything - he marches into dark crypts and abandoned catacombs without a second thought and with enough authority to make you believe that damn, this guy isn’t afraid of anything. The rest of the movie is populated with mostly unfamiliar faces that do a good enough job to keep things above the waterline. Most recognizable is Alan Ford, (Bricktop from Snatch) playing a truly repugnant character with teeth that make Austin Powers look like David Hasselhoff. A bit over the top perhaps, but then again, director Harlin has never been known for subtlety.

But the line that Exorcist: The Beginning fails to reach is the hard-to-pin-down difference between gross-out horror and psychological horror. Sure, the movie has a lot of blood and some pretty scary moments, but most of them have to do with the been-there-done-that method of something jumping out of the dark with loud music accompaniment. Does it make you jump? Yep. Are we surprised at all? Nope.

Unfortunately, some of the effects are pretty bad considering that this is a major release; quite a few times it’s quite obvious when something is replaced by CGI, and it only serves to draw your attention away from what’s supposed to be a scary moment.

My main beef with the flick was that with such an impressive pedigree to draw from and an intriguing subject matter that can be terrifying if done right, it didn’t push any boundaries or head into new territory; we’ve seen this all done before. When stripped of the Exorcist name, it’s nothing more than a slickly produced B-movie in line with Jeepers Creepers or any one of the eleven (!) Friday the 13^th movies.

If your expectations aren’t too high and/or you’ve never seen the superior original, you could do worse than this for delivering a few chills. But if you’re looking for something that has more than just cheap scares or something that you won’t forget about by the next morning, you could certainly do better.

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