Saturday 4 February 2006
Exorcist: The Beginning (2004)
Somewhere back in my archives last August you can find a review of a film I saw at FrightFest: "Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist". That was the Paul Schrader film which the studio killed and never released to cinemas; instead they employed Renny Harlin to shoot a new film which they hoped would be more commercial and this was it! Why they should approach a journeyman director to produce something stupendous is beyond me since "Dominion" was a beautifully crafted movie but just not gory enough for the powers that be; so they ended up with this potboiler which is full of cheap scares but totally devoid of logic and about as subtle as a sledgehammer. Harlin obviously subscribes to the Italian view of horror: throw in flies and crawling maggots if you want to make the audience feel ill. Anyhow I needed to view this one for comparative purposes but you can take bets that I won't be watching it again.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
It was after reading the previous entry that I put it on my must view list. Saw it in December - the original one that is. I tried to see it in retrospect - it must have been so chilling at the time, but the horror genre has moved on so far. On rewatching the camera work, and the pastiches they came up with were something I guess you wouldn't see in the modern one. Max von Sydow kind of carried the film though, being the charismatic actor that he is, and I guess the modern one doesn't benefit from this either. Sometimes they just need to let the classics lie, they have a mystique about them that was right for the time but can never be reprocated.....
Post a Comment