Exorcist II: The Heretic — the trailer!

If you have not yet seen the trailer for Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) — John Boorman’s mind-bogglingly awful sequel to William Friedkin’s mind-blowingly good The Exorcist (1973), a sequel so terrible that it came a narrow second to Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) in the Medved brothers’ bad-movie book The Golden Turkey Awards — then here, at last, is your chance:

Exorcist II: The Heretic essentially tries to pull a Godfather Part II (1974) on us by going both backwards and forwards — backwards to the early days of Father Merrin’s ministry, when he first battled the demon Pazuzu (hence the return of Max von Sydow, whose character died in the first film), and forwards to, um, some weird science-lab experiments that a now-teenaged Linda Blair is subjected to. I posted some comments on the film here a few years ago, but suffice to say it is so bad that none of the subsequent sequels or prequels paid any attention to it. And to think it brought back so many members of the original cast.

I’m posting this here today because every now and then someone rises to the defense of this film — or at least to some sort of semi-defense. And today’s brave, articulate soul is Faisal Qureshi, writing for ScreenGrab’s ‘When Good Directors Go Bad’ series.