The Exorcist: Believer is One Hell of a Terrible Time at the Movies

I'm pretty sure William Friedkin deliberately died so he wouldn't have to deal with this movie.

This weekend I learned two things that made me deliriously, excessively, inappropriately happy and excited.

I discovered the first of these two wonders when I was walking to a wedding at the Cleveland Cemetery and passed Kenny Rogers’ grave. THE Kenny Rogers! The Gambler himself! Kenny Rogers of Kenny Rogers Roasters!

Oh, but I was excited. I had no idea that Rogers was buried in Atlanta, or that I had somehow accidentally stumbled upon his final resting place. Bobby Jones was also buried there and while I know that he is a legendary golfer who the guy who directed Road House made a deeply boring movie about, I do not care about golf and I do not care about Bobby Jones.

I do, however, care about country music and pop culture so I was giddy with excitement over the prospect of spending a little time at Kenny Rogers’ grave so I could pay my respects to the man and his music.

Unfortunately we were running late for the wedding so we weren’t able to visit Kenny Rogers’ grave before the soiree and by the time it ended it was too dark to find the grave.

I went home disappointed. People from all over the world come to Kenny Rogers’ grave as a sacred pilgrimage and I somehow stumbled across his grave by accident and tragically wasn’t able to visit it.

When I look back at the smoldering wreckage that is my life and career I have so many regrets. So, so many regrets, but I don’t regret anything half as much as I regret not visiting Kenny Rogers’ grave when I had the chance.

The second discovery that rocked my world was that The Exorcist: Believer, the movie that you sadistically chose for me to watch and write about in this week’s poll was available in 4D.

4D! That’s one whole dimension better than 3-D, the wonderful, not at all limited or gimmicky format where shit flies at you in all three dimensions.

In 4D you don’t just watch the movie. You LIVE it. If a possessed girl throws up on a sympathetic priest you’re deluged with vomit! If someone bleeds from their crotch as a way of taunting a woman of faith then that blood somehow gets on you, the audience member as well.

I’m not sure how it works except that space wizards invented it and they are extremely intelligent. Unfortunately 4D was only available on Saturday night. By the time I saw The Exorcist: Believer last night I had to watch it in RPX like an animal.

I was disappointed. So, so disappointed! Then the movie came on and I was even more disappointed.

The Exorcist: Believer opens with a prologue in Haiti where photographer Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is vacationing with his very pregnant wife Sorenne (Tracey Graves).

Then a massive earthquake hits that really gives the RPX (for Regal Premium Experience) an opportunity to shine. Throughout the earthquake the theater rumbled and vibrated slightly to poorly simulate the experience of being in an earthquake.

It was about as impressive as RPX gets and it honestly wasn’t even that cool.

Sorenne is gravely injured and Victor is faced with a real Sophie’s Choice situation. He can save his unborn daughter or he can save his wife but he can’t save both and he will have to live with the decision and the awful knowledge that he chose to end one life so that another can continue until his dying days.

The scene where Victor is given the bad news feels like heavy-handed camp out of a second-rate horror anthology television series than something you’d find in a David Gordon Green.

As in Halloween Ends, the sometimes great auteur here is nothing but a sub-par journeyman resigned to giving audiences what he thinks they want even if it means sacrificing his own personality and vision.

After a Bratz: The Movie-style thirteen year time jump we catch back up with Victor, who is now a widower who has lost his faith and is living with his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett).

One day Angela goes on a walk with her Baptist friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) and disappears. For three days the desperate parents look for their daughters without luck.

Then the girls are found in a stranger’s home but they are not the same. Something entered their spirit during those three lost days, something evil and wicked and powerful. Could it be… Satan?

It isn’t long until both girls are possessed by Satanic entities. In desperation the parents turn to Chris MacNeil, the tough-willed actress and survivor Ellen Burstyn unforgettably played in the legendary 1973 original.

Burstyn has been upfront in the press about doing The Exorcist: Believer only because they agreed to pay her an enormous of money AND set up scholarships for actors in her name but that would be evident even without Burstyn’s candid admission.

The filmmakers have no idea what to do with Burstyn beyond having her show up so that the film has some connection to the fifty year old masterpiece that started it all.

She’s central for the action for about ten minutes before something very bad happens to her. I won’t spoil it for you but it involves getting stabbed in the eyes.

Burstyn miraculously survives and the movie cuts to her every twenty minutes or so to let audiences know that even though it seems like The Exorcist: Believer is just a shitty knock-off with no scares or atmosphere or heady intellectual or spiritual concerns it actually is sort of a sequel since the star of the original agreed to reprise her role after they backed the proverbial money truck up to her home.

Linda Blair is terrifying as well as poignant in The Exorcist not because she’s a literal demon from hell who speaks in a profane rasp and has the devil’s own theatricality. No, the character is powerful and unexpectedly moving because she is a little girl who is vulnerable and human and wracked with unimaginable torments. It’s the innocence that’s haunting, not the cheap transgression.

The possessed girls of The Exorcist: Believer, in sharp contrast, go directly from being normal tweens to being inhuman ghouls. We don’t spend any real time with them before they go missing so we’re not able to relate to them on a human level.

The evil spirits possessing the girls use the guilt and sin of those around them to manipulate them. The demons possessing the girls are a tiresome lot, literal insult comics from hell who speak in a razor blade rasp and get off on blasphemy.

At one point a priest enters the picture, then bows out, then has a change of heart. The parents are forced to choose which girl will live and which girl will die in a terrible choice that echoes the one Victor faced at the start of the film.

The Exorcist: Believer doesn’t even have the decency to be bad in a fun, distinctive way. If Green had a vision for this material beyond pocketing a big payday for derivative hackwork you wouldn’t know it.

Between this and Halloween Ends I’m starting to think that Green might not be a great horror filmmaker after all. It is, alas, too early to bequeath upon him the highest honor known to man: frightmaster.

Green sadly has not mastered fright and The Exorcist: Believer is little more than a forgettable, disposable footnote to William Friedkin’s devastating, timeless original

One out of Five Stars