Exorcist: The Beginning (2004)

I'm not a big fan of the original Exorcist (it leans too heavily on its shock effects, and as previously stated theologically-minded horror films tend to leave me cold), but I do respect its ambition. Here was a film attempting to examine the inexplicability of evil, the oft-random cruelty of sickness and death... plus it was doing all this whilst framing the argument in Catholic terms. It could be said that The Exorcist is one of the rare Hollywood films to wrestle with why God lets bad things happen. Bad things, like, say, this absolutely vile prequel, which takes the ideas and themes that have run through the entire series and expunges them, leaving only the blood-and-thunder followup that Warner always wanted but could never quite convince anyone to make. The end result, as you might imagine, is wretched. It's a series of orgiastic gore effects in search of a movie, with the only advice from the studio apparently being "more disgusting = more better." So we have a boy torn apart by hyenas and a woman birthing a maggot-covered baby and crowns pecking apart a corpse and other such fun stuff. I realize it's probably disingenuous for me, of all people, to complain about a film's violent content, given my positive response to films like Ichi the Killer (which has at least three scenes that feel positively misogynistic), Sin City (which includes cannibalism, castration-by-hand and a man eaten alive by a wolf, all locked in an adolescent mindset) and Run and Kill (in which a girl is immolated while her father watches). But at least those films (among others) understood the nature and effect of violence, and each knew exactly how far they had to go to get a certain reaction, whether it be intellectual or purely visceral. Exorcist: The Beginning doesn't know about the line. It pushes the gorehound button not because it's trying to thrill or excite or provoke but because it doesn't know what else to do. This single-minded dedication to revulsion above all else, even in scenes where it's not warranted (note, for instance, the overexcited blood F/X during the climactic clash between the British and the native) speaks to a deep sickness within the film's makers. Caught between making a film for thinkers and a film for gore fanatics, they got confused and started doling out random elements haphazardly (including, just for extra bad taste, some Holocaust flashbacks). The result is, to steal some words from El-P, "measurements tossed to nothing for no one, a wasted effort, a shrug." This is useless, hateful garbage. See it and feel a little bit worse about humanity.

Grade: F