‘Boorman and the Devil’ Review: An Enjoyably Exhaustive Doc Chronicles the Making of ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic,’ One of Hollywood’s Most Despised Sequels  

As much as moviegoers love to get behind a box office smash, keeping the buzz alive and pumping up ticket sales, they can also display real schadenfreude when it comes to Hollywood disasters. Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, Kevin Costner’s Waterworld, Disney’s John Carter and, well, Cats, are a few major flops that audiences seemed to delight in, even if most people never saw the films themselves. Despite rumors, some of those movies actually made their money back. And in the case of Cimino’s epic western, the film was deemed a masterpiece decades after it came out.

This is unlikely to happen with Exorcist II: The Heretic, the much-anticipated follow-up to William Friedkin’s horror classic that turned out to be a colossal studio misfire. Laughed off the screen when it was released in the summer of 1977 — the same summer that saw Star Wars change the blockbuster game forever — John Boorman’s critical and commercial bomb has gone down as a case study in how not to make a sequel.

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But was it really such a disaster? The new documentary Boorman and the Devil mostly answers that question affirmatively, providing a play-by-play account of the film’s troubled — or as many believed, cursed — production, followed by its catastrophic reception. And yet this exhaustive chronicle of movie madness also asks if a flop can sometimes be a good thing, proving that artistic freedom still exists in an industry that keeps trying to remove it from the formula.

Directed by David Kittredge (Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror), who goes out of his way to interview everyone involved in the misadventure, from 92-year-old Boorman to the entomologist in charge of wrangling locusts on set, the doc delves deep into a project that had the potential, and certainly the money, to be something special.

At the time, sequels were new in Hollywood. The Godfather Part II was one of the first films to use such a sequential title and went on to win six Oscars. Banking off the triumph of The Exorcist, which pulled in a whopping $429 million in 1973, Paramount was ready to throw everything — a budget that ballooned to $15 million ($85 million today), a half-sober Richard Burton, a goofy “synchronized  hypnosis” machine, and yes, thousands of locusts shipped from Africa — at a project they assumed would be another hit, especially with Linda Blair returning (for a huge fee) to play the lead.

This, as well as the fact that studios easily recouped their budget by “blind bidding” features and locking in months of guaranteed theatrical play, explains why Paramount gave Boorman — along with screenwriters William Goodhart and Rospo Pallenberg (the latter did extensive rewrites but was never credited) — free reign to make what one of them describes as “a film about metaphysics.” The director himself refers to the project as “a bit excessive,” which feels like an understatement given what he cooked up.

In the early 70s, the British maverick had already made a name for himself with Deliverance, which was the kind of artsy genre flick championed by a New Hollywood whose directors owed more to the European arthouse than to classic studio fare. In true auteur fashion, Boorman tells us that his goal with Exorcist II “wasn’t a sequel, it was a repost.” He also says that his good friend Stanley Kubrick advised him to just make the same movie, but with two times the blood and gore.

Had Boorman heeded Kubrick’s advice and shot another Exorcist with double the violence, there’d probably be no story here. (Another Friedkin sequel, John Frankenheimer’s underrated French Connection II, delivered the goods in that sense.) But the Paramount production was plagued by more than directorial conceit: Boorman came down with a rare disease, caused by inhaling sand while lensing the film’s desert sequences, that left him hospitalized and pushed the shoot back for five weeks. Blair, who’s hilariously candid in her interviews, showed up late on set and refused to don the same makeup from the first movie. Meanwhile, the cagey Burton completely phoned in his performance and went home at six o’clock on the dot, even if they were in the middle of a take.

Kittredge uses animated sequences to recreate some of the on-set mayhem, interviewing any technician (camera assistants, the script supervisor, etc.) he could get his hands on to provide the full story. The director can lose us a bit with too many details, which drag on during the doc’s middle section, although horror fans and movie buffs will certainly have plenty to chew on (and then regurgitate with green vomit).

When The Heretic — which, as Boorman argues, should have been the sole title, without any “II” — was finally ready for release, nobody seemed prepared for the bomb it turned into. Kittredge gives us several accounts of a disastrous sneak preview in which an angry Exorcist fan stood up and pointed at the Paramount execs in attendance, shouting “The people who made this piece of shit are in the theater!” and prompting a chase into the street. Reviews were among the worst ever for a studio production.

Even if Boorman cut out 15 minutes and changed the ending after the movie was already out for distribution, the damage was done. (The director made a comeback four years later with his medieval action hit, Excalibur). Watching Exorcist II: The Heretic now, as I did before catching the documentary, it’s easy to see what so many fans hated about it. The film is indeed a total muddle, with moments of craptastic dialogue and acting, and it certainly isn’t as scary as the first one. In fact, the movie isn’t really scary at all — just extremely weird, as well as increasingly incomprehensible toward the end.

But there are also flashes of visual splendor, like tiny shards of some kind of exotic broken vase — fragments of what could have been. A coterie of critics featured at the start and close of Boorman and the Devil have mixed opinions on the movie, but there are more lovers than haters. Stephanie Zacharek of Time praises its originality, while biographer Joseph McBride offers the final word by categorically claiming it to be a masterpiece.

Whatever your take, the crazy story behind Exorcist II: The Heretic is ultimately one of nostalgia — for a time when ambitious filmmakers like Boorman could go to Hollywood and commit “the sin of hubris,” and then go to hell for it.