Exorcist II: The Heretic

Exorcist II: The Heretic has a reputation as one of the worst sequels ever made and that reputation is largely deserved, though the film's specific brand of failure makes it fascinating rather than simply boring. John Boorman, fresh off Deliverance, reaches for something metaphysical about the nature of good and evil and instead delivers synchronized hypnosis machines, a bare-chested James Earl Jones in a locust headdress, and Richard Burton beating out a fire with a crutch in a moment of pure, unintentional comedy. Louise Fletcher and Max von Sydow bring genuine gravitas to material that keeps undercutting them, and Ennio Morricone's score is doing far more work than the screenplay deserves. It abandons everything that made the original terrifying, the intimacy, the restraint, the belief that evil doesn't need to explain itself, in favor of studio-mandated spectacle that explains far too much. Curious viewing purely as a cautionary tale about what happens when a sequel tries to out-think rather than out-scare its predecessor.