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| Turkish title: Satan |
Starring: Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Max von Sydow
Running Time: 2 hours, 2 minutes
Rating: R
Pre-Conceived Notions: Pre-conceived notions about The Exorcist? I am scared shitless to sit down and watch it because I heard so many fantastical things about how creepy it is. It’s so creepy in fact that the physical film itself was thought to be possessed by a demon. Have you seen the IMDb trivia page to this? Friedkin put his actors through hell. Poor Ellen Burstyn suffered a back injury when they yanked her harness really hard during one of the scenes. And Mercedes McCambridge had to do all sorts of crazy things to perform the part of Pazuzu. She swallowed raw eggs and smoked like one of those machines that smoke 20 cigarettes all at once. But the awful part is that she wasn’t in the final credits. Friedkin was kind of a jerk. Not gonna lie. Back on track: I’m really excited to see how this holds up after 41 years. Part of me hopes it does, and part of me doesn’t so I am not actually scared shitless. These are new pants.
Why I Haven't Seen This Film: It’s The Exorcist.
Bit-O-Trivia from the IMDb page: “This is Warner Brothers’ highest grossing film of all time when adjusted for inflation.”
2 hours, 2 minutes later…: A couple things before we get into the meat and potatoes of the movie. 1) I really wish they had developed the plot more. It seemed like there were key scenes missing. Like, okay. One minute Regan is a normal 12-year-old girl, then she goes up to bed, and KAPOW! She’s possessed and urinating on the carpet. I mean, come on! Can you build up the suspense just a little bit more? 2) I would really liked to have seen a scene where Burke flies through the window. We get nothing of that. The character of Burke is dead all of a sudden, Ellen Burstyn has an overreaction, and we’re left sitting there thinking, “Who the hell is Burke?” 3) The way the whole exorcism is dealt with. Father Karras keeps saying, “It’s going to take an awful lot of evidence to get an exorcism approved,” and then he gets all this evidence, and he tells Chris that he really doesn’t have a lot of evidence. Cut to he’s meeting the monsignor, cut to the monk delivery service in the woods, cut to they’re doing the exorcism. What? Why mention the difficulty of getting approved when you’re not going to spend a lot of time on it in the film? Maybe all these scenes I’m mentioning were cut and they’re on the DVD. All I can say is that it made for a very choppy film.
The one thing I came away with from this movie was thank the universe I was not alive during the early 70s. Were all those medical procedures authentic? The arteriogram shit that was going on there? Dude. And whatever that other thing was? Double dude. And my hats off to Linda Blair. What she had to go through to make the film was incredible. 75% of her screen time was her tied to a bed in the middle of a refrigerated bedroom set, 25% was her having to go through that freaky-deaky medical stuff, and the remaining 15% was of her being a regular kid.
There were some comedic parts thrown in there, too. Like when Chris MacNeil asks her nanny at the end of the film, “Are you sure you don’t want to stay with us?” Are you freaking kidding me? Your daughter just went through an exorcism during the course of which 2 priests died (**Spoiler!!**), shit was flying around her room, and freaky stuff happened 24/7. No. She doesn’t want to remain in your employ, you freak of a woman, you.
Final Thoughts: The movie wasn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be, but I can say with certainty that if I had been a moviegoer in 1973, I’d be scared of split-pea soup for the rest of my life. The sound design was magnificent, and for the time in which it was made, it’s a very impressive bit of cinema. But unfortunately it doesn’t hold up very well. 4 out of 6 slices of pizza.
2 hours, 2 minutes later…: A couple things before we get into the meat and potatoes of the movie. 1) I really wish they had developed the plot more. It seemed like there were key scenes missing. Like, okay. One minute Regan is a normal 12-year-old girl, then she goes up to bed, and KAPOW! She’s possessed and urinating on the carpet. I mean, come on! Can you build up the suspense just a little bit more? 2) I would really liked to have seen a scene where Burke flies through the window. We get nothing of that. The character of Burke is dead all of a sudden, Ellen Burstyn has an overreaction, and we’re left sitting there thinking, “Who the hell is Burke?” 3) The way the whole exorcism is dealt with. Father Karras keeps saying, “It’s going to take an awful lot of evidence to get an exorcism approved,” and then he gets all this evidence, and he tells Chris that he really doesn’t have a lot of evidence. Cut to he’s meeting the monsignor, cut to the monk delivery service in the woods, cut to they’re doing the exorcism. What? Why mention the difficulty of getting approved when you’re not going to spend a lot of time on it in the film? Maybe all these scenes I’m mentioning were cut and they’re on the DVD. All I can say is that it made for a very choppy film.
The one thing I came away with from this movie was thank the universe I was not alive during the early 70s. Were all those medical procedures authentic? The arteriogram shit that was going on there? Dude. And whatever that other thing was? Double dude. And my hats off to Linda Blair. What she had to go through to make the film was incredible. 75% of her screen time was her tied to a bed in the middle of a refrigerated bedroom set, 25% was her having to go through that freaky-deaky medical stuff, and the remaining 15% was of her being a regular kid.
There were some comedic parts thrown in there, too. Like when Chris MacNeil asks her nanny at the end of the film, “Are you sure you don’t want to stay with us?” Are you freaking kidding me? Your daughter just went through an exorcism during the course of which 2 priests died (**Spoiler!!**), shit was flying around her room, and freaky stuff happened 24/7. No. She doesn’t want to remain in your employ, you freak of a woman, you.
Final Thoughts: The movie wasn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be, but I can say with certainty that if I had been a moviegoer in 1973, I’d be scared of split-pea soup for the rest of my life. The sound design was magnificent, and for the time in which it was made, it’s a very impressive bit of cinema. But unfortunately it doesn’t hold up very well. 4 out of 6 slices of pizza.
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