Maximum Overdrive (1986)

In 1987, a horrible event happened that changed the course of human history. Machines came to life and slaughtered everybody for no reason. It happened so fast nobody could predict it or tell what the Hell was going on. If it hadn’t been for a bunch of idiots at a random gas station in the middle of nowhere, people today would still be enslaved to a bunch of 18-wheeler trucks. Oh the horror! Let us recount the terrifying events of that day in the Stephen King directed vessel Maximum Overdrive…

Director: Stephen King

Starring: Emilio Estevez, Laura Harrington, Pat Hingle

IMDb

We start off this movie with the King himself flabbergasted that a bunch of machines and electric signs at the bank are saying some rather rude things to him when he tries to withdraw money:

Well I mean obviously THAT already happens at the bank every time we use it. It's just delivered in a more direct manner here.

We then get what probably took up most of the special effects budget for this as a bunch of cars and trucks crash on a bridge that won’t go down like it’s supposed to, causing a horrible accident. Some people fall off the bridge. May their sacrifice be remembered … let us bow our heads for a moment of silence for these fallen brothers and sisters, the first casualties of the Great Truck War of 1987.

Let us also remember the Great Watermelon Genocide of 1987. Never forget!

After that, we finally get our main destination for the movie – this truck stop diner out in the country, where a guy named Bill is pissed off that he has to work extra hours for no pay. But his boss, a fat jackass named Bubba Hendershot, sees things differently because Bill is a convict out on parole.

If they handed this guy the keys to the kingdom and told him he could rule the Earth, I for one would be fuckin' terrified. His power trip in this movie is bordering on the massive. Never underestimate the power that a gas station owner holds, I guess.

Geez, the Green Goblin’s concept design for The Amazing Spider-Man 3 is really out there and not what I expected:

Sony production executives consider it an interesting twist on the character. People on the Internet bitched and moaned for days even though there was no script or even a trailer yet.

For the next half hour or so, the movie is at its best – just random death scenes via machines. Like at a baseball field, where one guy goes to get a soda and kicks the machine. What he didn’t count on was that the soda machine had FINALLY HAD ENOUGH and so it kills him. While I do wish there were more scenes here of the kids hitting soda cans with their baseball bats, I have to say the one kid who blocks them with his catcher’s mask is just priceless – easily one of the funniest things in the movie.

That's fucking badass. This kid is going places. Like, he will probably grow up to be a Die Hard-esque action hero.

One of the kids ends up escaping and runs off to witness more of the wanton destruction. I’m sure he’ll have a great time watching Sylvester Stallone’s take on the Brave Little Toaster.

Meanwhile, a girl who looks suspiciously like she belongs in a Mark Twain novel is riding in a car with some sleazebag who keeps on touching her thigh. When she tells him (rightfully) to fuck off, he gets self-righteous and starts talking about Jesus and complaining that kids today are SO vulgar and foul-mouthed. I’m just amazed at the subtlety with which King is attacking Christians – truly a masterwork of religious satire!

"Does it bother you that you're the cliche perverted douchenozzle with no moral compass who tries to invoke Christian moral values incredibly hypocritically?"
"Not really."
"Man, it's tired and dated that King is still trying to shoehorn in un-subtle messages about the hypocrisy and belligerence of hyper-religious far-right Christian assholes?"
"I guess. I just can't believe they're letting us go on this long about it."

On another note, when an ice cream truck goes evil and kills its owner, WHY would it still have its tinkly ice cream music playing?! Just for ironic laughs? I guess maybe it wants to tell all the other evil trucks and household appliances that it still has ice cream left over. I wonder what it would do in a fight – maybe open up the back doors and spill ice cream all over its enemies. There are just so many possibilities with this. I hope to one day see a Michael Bay Transformer sequel with this ice cream truck character in it.

Actually I probably still wouldn’t watch it – but sshhhh, it’s the joke that matters!

We also get to meet the best characters in the film. Some newlywed couple is driving down a country road aimlessly after being married. I dunno, maybe they’re going to celebrate their honeymoon in Children of the Corn country. The wife is loud and annoying, and the guy is … eh, mostly just bland. The wife’s absolute asinine nature makes up for that though. They come across a bloodied up dead guy and the wife asks “Is he dead?”

"Nah, he's just taking a nap."

What, are you fuckin’ blind? The only way he isn’t dead is if he just happened to take a drunken nap after being doused in a vat of fake blood and movie make-up gore effects. What follows is a scene where a truck tries to kill them. The wife screams a lot, which probably had the effect of making even dogs in the audience go deaf. They end up getting away unscathed, luckily for them – BUT NOT FOR US! We still have to sit through the rest of the movie with these two characters. Particularly the wife will make you want to claw your eardrums out. Thanks for that one, Stephen King!

Well, it's happened; annoyance finally has a face.

Back at Country Truck Stop Diner Land, we see that another condition of employment, besides having to work random extra hours for no extra pay, is having to light the boss’s cigars for him:

Their jobs also include shining his shoes and wiping his ass.

Shit job. But you know what’s really a shit job? When you’re trying to have some peace and quiet on the John and the main character in a Stephen King movie looks over the wall of the stall at you.

"I really couldn't have just talked to you without looking over the stall because.....uhhhh...."

Jesus, man! Personal boundaries! Get with the program! I guess King really wanted Bill to be a coprophiliac – that gives him an edge over other King main characters.

Because otherwise, we see Bill becoming the cliché Stephen King main character: he’s a young, scruffy guy with a checkered past just trying to beat the odds, and now he also has a hot chick who likes him! Probably just ‘cause they’re the only two characters in their age bracket in the diner. All the others are either old, fat or disgusting – and c’mon, nobody wants to see a sex scene with someone like THAT.

Yup, a sex scene, right in the middle of the apocalypse. I kinda get it – make the best of what could be your last hours alive. But it’s fucked up in this movie because THESE TWO ARE SUPPOSED TO BE THE MAIN CHARACTERS. I mean, they were trying to solve the damn problem before this. And now they’re willing to just throw their hands in the air, say ‘fuck it’ and then … well, actually go fuck it?

It’s just backwards. What the hell am I even doing? Let’s get back to talking about trucks going evil and turning on humanity. How about more scenes with the newlyweds trying to escape Optimus Prime’s disgruntled brothers-in-law?

Oh, put a sock on it.

We see them trying to escape more evil trucks. After narrowly escaping a confrontation, the wife turns to the husband and screams “I NEVER SHOULD’VE LET YOU DRIVE AGAIN!” Because, you know, whenever HE drives, 18-wheel trucks try to take over the planet. For the love of Christ, just let her drive for the rest of the marriage.

"Video games AND shower facilities? That's everything a girl could want!"

It doesn’t even make sense – I mean he IS keeping her ALIVE for fuck’s sake. You could show a little gratitude!

They get to the diner and are promptly welcomed with open arms, as they are clearly among good company with the other annoying people in this movie. I’m so glad we finally get to see a collection of the annoying stereotypes you make when you’re telling a story while mad at a relative all gathered together in one place. There's also this other lady, who in the middle of the night feels an uncontrollable urge to run outside and address the trucks in her best impression of a drug overdose, screaming "WE MADE YOU! WE MADE YOU!"

This is what Shakespeare really wanted back in the day and was actually trying to capture when he wrote such characters as Lady Macbeth.

I guess we finally get some action when they start trying to fight the trucks. Bubba pulls out a rocket launcher he just happened to have around the gas station, and starts blowing the fuck out of everything.

He may be a complete detestable jackass, but never let it be said that he lies down like a welcome mat for evil trucks bent on world domination!

Yeah, well, I certainly feel safe going to piece-of-shit gas stations now that I know the intolerant redneck assholes owning them carry rocket launchers. Peachy! Things are going pretty well, as far as apocalyptic truck versus human battles go, until a military cannon tank shows up and begins killing everyone. I guess the humans were asking for it though, as they just kinda stand around and look dumbly as the cannon begins to fire. Yes, they clearly have time to move. No, they do not take advantage of that time.

"Yeah...I could have ducked or tried to dodge, but I'm a fuckin' idiot."

So I guess that’s the final straw for the humans, as they are now slaves to the trucks! But wait a second – how will the trucks order their slaves around if they don’t speak the same language?! Well, it’s simple – they teach the humans how to speak their language, which is just honking car horns of course. So all the humans forget how to speak English and instead just honk like really annoying ducks all the time. And that’s the end of the world as we know it.

No, that actually was a lie – I know; how can you ever trust me again? Actually the trucks start honking their horns in Morse code, and the little kid understands it and translates. Apparently they want to be “fed” with gas – so I guess the human characters become unwilling gas station attendant slaves.

What follows is pretty much the worst climax ever. It’s nothing but people filling 18-wheeler trucks with gas. Where’s the excitement in that? I get what it was going for, but come on. You could at least put in some car-washing scenes too. Or some paint job change scenes. The possibilities for humans being truck slaves are infinite, and King does not take advantage of it!

The worst kind of slavery is the kind that makes you recall summer jobs you had when you were a kid.

I guess they eventually escape through a tunnel in the sewers. They go to a dock to find this boat which can lead them to an island with no motor vehicles. They’re about to leave when the Green Goblin truck finds them and attempts to do something – though I’m not sure what, as he’s just a truck and they are clearly already in the boat. But they destroy it anyway, finally bringing down the Green Goblin truck and, apparently, ending the entire truckpocalypse right then and there.

What? How do you even know that worked? Why are you celebrating because you destroyed ONE TRUCK?! What about the rest of the world? Isn't it a bit soon to be cheering and dancing when the rest of the world could still be in grave danger?

But of course we don’t get an answer – just a text scroll explaining that everything turned back to normal because really what was causing it was a comet passing over and showering radiation on the Earth. Oh, well that explains it. I hate when that happens. Just like the one last year that made all dairy products come to life and turn evil. The milk shelves at Wal-Mart have never been the same!

We end on the sounds of our heroes sailing off to the island anyway – well, actually we end with the squawking annoying voice of that newlywed wife character, bitching and complaining about more shit even though they just technically saved the world. Is anything good enough? Will SOMEBODY please shut her up?! It’s really fuckin’ unbelievable that they actually ended on this character’s voice – she’s so annoying she practically BEGS to be killed off. That’s what would normally happen to a character like this. But King said ‘nope, we’re letting her live to the end.’

Thank you. Thank you so much for that.

On the other hand, I am glad this movie is finally daring to tell the true story of what happened in 1987 when the trucks came to life. It was for sure a traumatic and world-changing event that we will remember for decades to come and put in the history books. I for one am just glad King made this movie so we can appreciate the real historical value of what happened and learn from our mistakes.

Images copyright of their original owners. I own none of them.

REVIEW: Pet Sematary (1989)

That isn’t how you spell cemetery! Instant zero stars, review over!

Director: Mary Lambert

Starring: Dale Midkiff, Fred Gwynne

IMDb

Oh okay, I’ve read the Stephen King book; calm down. It was one of my favorite books as a teenager just for how absolutely, uncompromisingly dark and morbid it was. It’s said that it was the only one of King’s classics that he didn’t want to publish at first – he thought it was too scary. So in response to that, we got a movie version a few years later that mostly failed at recreating that scary and morbid atmosphere…let’s review Pet Sematary.

We start off with a graveyard for pets, with voice overs from the kids who buried them there. Well gee. Isn’t that a happy way to start off your movie? Fortunately after that, we get something much more grounded in every day life…a family arrives at their new home and is too busy re-enacting a Norman Rockwell painting to notice their two-year-old son Gage wander around the yard and almost get run over by a truck in the middle of the road.

All that's missing is a white picket fence, which would ironically have helped these morons quite a bit...

You could have just not let him wander near the road. You know, like decent parents. But I guess that would have prevented the introduction of the most sane and well-balanced old man ever, Jud Crandall.

They didn't have an old peoples' home in this town, I guess...

Am I being sarcastic with that last bit? Well, you decide: the first thing he decides to show them as a neighborly kindness is an old graveyard for buried pets, the same one as in the opening. “Hey, welcome to the neighborhood, let me show you a creepy old pet graveyard!” Isn’t that kind of weird? You could have shown them the nice areas to have a picnic in, or the general store downtown, or even the spot on the hill where you looked up at the full moon as a young man and realized you were stuck with that goofy accent for your whole life. But instead you show them a graveyard for dead pets killed in the road.

Oh, yeah, that’s where most of ‘em come from…seriously, here’s a piece of advice for you: PUT UP A FUCKING STOP SIGN ON THAT DAMN ROAD. How has that never been brought up at any community meetings or anything?

“Hey, we got this road where it seems like nothing but giant trucks come through, and there are tons of animals and little kids that might be in danger! Is it worth putting up a stop sign or at least some “drive with caution” markers?”

“Nah. We’re going to wait until an evil clown appears on the road before we do anything.”

“But there’s an Indian burial ground that brings dead things back to life just up the hill from the road! What if…”

“SHUT UP!”

Yeah, I guess that’s how it went. Anyway, we get some decent enough scenes of main character Louis Creed, his wife Rachel and his daughter, Mediocre Child Actress, interacting with one another and their cat, who they call Church. But I call him Cheap Scary Plot Foil. These scenes aren’t anything too bad or whatever, but the acting is about as credible as, well, any Stephen King adaptation this side of the Kubrick Shining version. King’s dialogue never translated well to the silver screen, like at all, but I don’t think the goofy acting really helps matters.

But anyway, we have more important things to show…like a grouchy old housekeeper who constantly tells Rachel how jealous she is of her marriage. Gee, I sure hope this character has a point in the end! Otherwise it would just be strange and non-sequitur.

"I'm just looking for my decency and likability...oh, wait, I left it at home..." 

We also see Louis at his job as a doctor. Some guy is wheeled in after a horrible accident, and like any good hospital, the whole place goes nuts and turns into complete chaos, even the nurses and orderlies, because of this. The guy’s name is Victor Pascow, and I only bring that up because for some reason, he’s an integral part of the plot. He knows Louis’s name somehow and reappears throughout the film as a sort of ghostly spirit guide…why? I have no fucking idea. Stephen King stories always have this sort of unexplained supernatural element to them, but this one is pushing it.

Anyway, let’s not get ahead of ourselves…so Pascow dies and later appears to Louis in a dream, guiding him outside into the woods and explicitly telling him never to go beyond the Pet Sematary and into the Micmac Burial Ground. Since Louis had no idea it existed at this point and likely wouldn’t have known about it at all if Pascow hadn’t told him about it, this scene kind of shoots itself in the foot. Bonus points because Pascow comes off more like a character from a Return of the Living Dead movie than anything actually scary. How are we supposed to take this seriously?

It's like a Muppet version of Dawn of the Dead. Shaun of the Dead looked less silly.

The next day is apparently Thanksgiving, so Rachel and the daughter, Ellie, go to Rachel’s parents’ house by themselves. Why doesn’t Louis go with them? Because apparently he doesn’t get along with her parents…sounds like a shitty Thanksgiving, then. Instead he just gets a dead cat:

Jud, being a stand-up guy, decides to take him out to the old burial ground where, apparently, dead things buried there can come back to life. They bury the cat. Louis talks to Jud about it and it’s only NOW that Jud decides to let Louis in on a little secret. Apparently as a kid, Jud buried his dead dog at the burial ground, and it came back as a horrific blood-stained monster:

He got ketchup all over him!

So let me get this straight. He knew this whole time what horrible things that burial ground could do, didn’t tell Louis any of it, and still took him up there anyway? What kind of sick sadist is this guy? I guess his explanation is that he didn’t want the daughter, Ellie, to be without her cat, but what kind of reasoning is that? He would rather her have a horrific abomination of nature that would scare the living bejeesus out of her? I mean, holy shit, how much less sense can you make?

Well, I guess if you count the fact that the daughter comes home and doesn’t notice that the cat is now a horrific abomination of nature, Jud’s lies and deceptions aren’t so bad. How can she not tell there’s something wrong? She even says the cat smells bad! How does the mother not notice? It’s one thing for the cat to stink a little after running around outside. But this is supposed to be like, corpse rot of death. Wouldn’t that be, I dunno, A LITTLE BIT NOTICEABLE after a while?

I guess it’s understandable though, since that random grumpy caretaker lady kills herself shortly after. Why? Well, to incite Rachel to tell Louis about her sick, demented sister who died when she was a kid. That’s right. The caretaker’s only point in life was to serve as the catalyst for a horrible flashback scene. I guess I can’t blame her for killing herself then. I mean, wouldn’t you? Take a look at this shit:

What is that? It looks like Beetlejuice if he was run through a concentration camp. I remember this storyline from the book – it was integrated into the story a lot better there. Here it’s shoehorned in very awkwardly in the wake of a random death scene. Basically it goes like this: Rachel had a sister when she was a kid who got some kind of debilitating disease, confining her to the back room of the house because the parents were ashamed of her or something.

Who are the two random fat people in the corner? Never explained...*Twilight Zone music*

One time her parents left her alone with the sister, and the sister died. Rachel ran out the door and cried but also thought she could have been laughing…this incident, apparently, gave her an odd relationship with death for the rest of her life. I remember this plot thread being relatively well done in the book, but here it’s just done awkwardly – maybe they should have left it out, because it really fucking sucks actually. It tries for unsettling and disturbing, and mostly hits “kind of weird and a little comical with how over the top it is.” How am I supposed to take anorexic Bride of the Lizard People sister seriously?

Yeah, real fucking ominous and scary there. Hacks.

And I get it – it’s the 80s, the special effects aren’t going to be that great. But they didn’t even really try at any kind of atmosphere. If The Thing, released several years before this, could make one of the scariest movies of all time with just practical effects, and Re-Animator, released around the same time, had much better looking zombies, what is the excuse for the lack of effort in making any of the effects here look remotely scary? They’re just goofy.

Anyway, so Louis hears that whole creepy dead sister story, and says it gives him “one more reason to hate Rachel’s parents” for leaving Rachel alone with the sister. Which is fine and well, except later we see that the parents are fine and really not portrayed as neglectful or abusive or anything. So what’s the point of putting any of this in the movie? Nothing really, except to waste time – which is one of the movie’s favorite things to do.

Tragedy strikes later on when their young son Gage is killed by a truck when he wanders out into the road. Again, stop signs, they’re not a foreign concept! It’s all very tragic and sad and what not. But honestly, I can’t get over the hypocrisy here…so Louis is so quick to condemn Rachel’s parents for leaving her alone with her sick sister, but he can’t even watch his own fucking son when he’s walking into the very dangerous road full of speeding 18-wheeler trucks? Nice double standard there, asshole. Also, nice over-dramatic “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” shout right after it happens – doesn’t diminish the weight of the scene at all…

I'd make a Darth Vader joke if this came out 15 years later!

So I guess some of these scenes are decent enough. Overall the movie at least tries to give a shit with these scenes, even if they’re not doing a terribly amazing job of it…though I can’t speak much for the goofy funeral scene where Rachel’s dad socks Louis in the face – deservedly so. Everyone starts screaming and shouting, and the whole thing comes off as more comical than it should. Pet Sematary, making child death way funnier than it ever had a right to be!

Rachel and Ellie leave to go live with Rachel’s parents for a while, and Louis ponders bringing Gage back to life with the burial ground. If you didn’t think it was stupid enough that Jud knew the effects of the burial ground and let Louis bury the cat anyway, well, the movie is about to top that. Jud then tells Louis the story of some guy who got buried in the burial ground after being shipped home from war in a coffin. In the book, this was an effective and morbid section. The movie treats it, unsurprisingly, like a big joke, having him bumble around slurring his words like a drunk. A middle finger to fans of the book if there ever was one.

So, yeah, that’s the size of it – Jud knew ALL THIS HORRIBLE SHIT happened at that burial ground, and showed Louis anyway. The stupidity is just reaching dizzying heights here, looking down on unsuspecting movie viewers and laughing at them. But hey! At least we have like twenty minutes of the ghost of Pascow “helping” Rachel to get back home after this!

Yes, if you weren’t convinced that this was just a schlocky horror comedy, well these scenes are like bright glowing neon lights pointing directly at that realization. We get all these ridiculous scenes of the ghost of Pascow, looking more and more like the ghost of Bill and Ted every scene, giving little hints to help her rent a car and hitch a ride after the car breaks down.

This has to be simultaneously the best and worst moment in the whole movie

She can’t do that shit on her own? She really needed help RENTING A CAR from the airport? Yeah, I guess that’s really one of those things that’s just too complicated to figure out without a ghost helping you. And to think these scenes were actually green-lighted by some poor sap of a studio executive…

Meanwhile, the now undead Gage preys on Jud by giggling childishly and asking to play hide and seek…yeah, real bone-tingling scary there. How come Jud doesn’t just leave his house and make a run for it? We see clearly he had many opportunities to do so. Oh well. Gage makes pretty sure he won’t be running anywhere any time soon:

How lovely…

When Rachel gets back, she for some reason goes to Jud’s place first instead of her own house. She sees the hallucination of her creepy dead sock puppet sister, which is as lame as ever, and then…

No. No, no, no, no no no. That can’t be real. You can’t be serious with that. When at any point in human existence did we need a cross-dressing undead baby? What the fuck was going through the director’s head when she allowed that in the movie? In fact, I think I know exactly what happened here. Gage came back to life the reincarnation of a certain fictional character…

If you were actually dumb enough to continue watching after that, we see Gage killing Rachel too. Louis the next morning gets a phone call from Gage – because that makes sense, even though he was too young to know how to use a phone when he was alive…and Gage tells him, quite creepily, that he wants to “play” with Louis. Louis stands there and shouts “WHAT DID YOU DO?!?” kind of like an over the top sitcom parent after the kid smeared finger paint all over Grandma’s expensive China plates. Just add in a goofy musical cue, cut to commercials, and the effect would be complete.

We get some more shitty ass acting when Louis yells at Church the cat to die after poisoning him – standing in the street and yelling at a dying zombie cat…not exactly a place you look forward to finding yourself, but there we are anyway. He goes inside and proves how hard it is to fight a two-year-old. Real fuckin’ gripping.

There is one good scene, where he has to kill Gage a second time with a lethal injection of some kind of poison. It’s a touching scene and is done well. I think it’s too little, too late.

The movie ends with Louis carrying zombie Rachel off to bury her in the burial ground. Pascow appears again and over-dramatically tells him not to do it, whilst simultaneously also sounding about as bored as anyone would with this mediocre script.

Contrast the seriousness of what happened with Pascow's girl shorts...

This could have been a powerful scene – if they cut out the silly ghost and didn’t have Louis muttering to himself about how it would work this time. In the book, everything he said was internal monologuing – NOT dialogue said out loud. Like most terrible book to movie adaptations, the movie feels the need to cram in all of that internal stuff and not just SHOW it through the visual power of filmmaking. Pretty fucking weak.

So, yeah, Rachel comes back and kills him for being a terrible actor and a terrible character, and then the movie ends.

Pet Sematary, promoting necrophilia since 1989.

So Pet Sematary kind of sucks. It’s silly, the characters are bland and the acting is pretty much awful. When I was a teenager and read the book, I didn’t see this movie because I feared it would be like this – just robbing all the power and macabre magic out of the story. And this movie was exactly what I thought it’d be back then. It’s got a few decent parts, but really it’s nothing like the book aside from the superficialities like the ideas in the plot – it’s got none of the darkness and mystery of the book.

And I don’t know. The book probably had some holes, too; plenty of the flaws I pointed out here were in the book, too. But King’s style of writing convinced you that the world you were in was real. That was a big asset to the story, as it is to any good book. The movie doesn’t immerse you like that. It can be entertaining at times, in a schlocky, silly sort of way, but it’s not the deep and immersive work that the book was. King’s writing style just doesn’t translate well to the screen. You can’t just take his long-winded dialogue and often abstract plot ideas and put them to film with no alterations. You have to make some changes to make it seem more natural, which Pet Sematary and most other King films do not do.

Oh well. There is a remake coming out, supposedly – maybe THAT will be closer to what I actually wanted from this story. It’s a far cry. But it won’t make this movie any better.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

REVIEW: The Exorcist (1973)

If I had a nickel for every demonic possession movie that came out these last five years or so, I’d be rich enough to make sure there was never another one. I mean honestly. What subset of movies has been sucked dry more than this? Let's just take a look at some of these wonderfully creative films which have so much of their own ideas...

 

...and the list goes on. It’s gone beyond beating a dead horse and more into beating a dead horse with the flogged carcass of another dead horse, while sitting on a third dead horse. Where does it end? Where did it begin?

Well, we can answer the second question.

Director: William Friedkin

Starring: Linda Blair, Ellen Burstyn

IMDb

Yes, The Exorcist, often touted as one of the scariest movies ever made. And rightly so. It’s a masterpiece. It is one of the most richly textured horror films out there, as much a drama as it is a horror film really. But at the same time, it also packs some of the blackest, vilest depths of evil you will ever see in a film. But to truly understand this masterpiece of cinema, we must call a priest and have him cast out everything from the movie so we can examine it.

The movie begins slowly, with an old man out in Iraq discovering some mysterious artifacts that remind him of something long-past that we don’t know about yet. We get some quiet build-ups that really just establish his character and the hesitation he’s going through. We fade out on a shot of him standing in the desert against a demonic shadow figure.

Pretty damn effective and ominous.

Then we get our main characters, Regan and Chris, who are both women born in that strange ambiguous time when men and womens’ names seemed to be interchangeable. Chris is an actress and spends her time trying to make her hairdo as gender-ambiguous as her name. When she’s not doing that, she hangs out with her British director, Burke Dennings, and plays with Regan in the evenings. Regan has made a new invisible friend named Captain Howdy, who I think used to hang out with the Devil’s Rejects cast before this movie.

Another difference between then and now: parents would immediately become suspicious in 2013 if their little girls started saying they were hanging out with Captain Howdy.

So the movie unfolds pretty slow and comfortably, taking its time to set up its characters. Shit – most modern movies would have had about twenty jump scares at this point. Some people might confuse this kind of pacing as sluggish, but I like it. It sets up everything very well and you get to like the characters pretty well. We get introduced to our other main character in Father Damien Karras, a priest in the city losing his faith while his ailing mother passes away under the gaze of uncaring relatives.

Here’s another thing this does so well – it really does a good job with those scenes of people trying to figure out what’s wrong with Regan. To start with, there really isn’t much of a transition into her getting sick. We get introduced to the character, she seems okay, and after we return from some of the Father Karras scenes, she’s just in the hospital – bam. No other explanation needed. I love how we find out a lot of the stuff wrong with her just through Chris talking with the doctors. There are no goofy over the top jump scares and no bullshit mythos – it’s all very grounded in reality at first, which is really the way to go. Unfortunately these days, we are so over-saturated with these kinds of stories and we have the Internet to contend with, so it wouldn’t be believable quite as much to have a scene like this in, say, The Last Exorcism III: The Dead Horse.

In The Exorcist though, we get some very good, detailed scenes of hard-working doctors trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with Regan. There are some expensive medical treatments and some very uncomfortable scenes. The film, again, takes its time. Remember in my Paranormal Activity review when I said research isn’t scary? This is the exception.

The reason is because it’s all so slowly built up – the film crawls toward its point by establishing that the characters really have no other options to turn to. Chris is pushed to her breaking point and simply cannot find any other explanation except the supernatural. She becomes so desperate that she ends up accepting the one thing she never thought she would: demonic forces from another plane of existence.

"Hmmm...my diagnosis is, you're fucked."

That’s really, really good, actually. If you’ve never seen this movie before, let me go back and explain a bit – in the middle of the research scenes where the doctors are puzzled about what’s wrong with Regan, one of the doctors asks if she or Regan has any religious beliefs. Chris replies that no, neither one of them do. Which would be a fairly commonplace thing nowadays – many people are atheists now and it’s not something to be ashamed of. Most people don’t even blink at that. But this was the 70s, when we as a country were just starting to come out of the long shadow of the Church and of religion in general. It was a confusing, transitional time and people were moving away from the old guard of religious beliefs – the world was changing.

And that’s the cincher right there – that’s why this movie is so scary. Because it takes a woman who, by all accounts is rational and modernistic in this world, and shows her that really, everything we know as sophisticated, civilized and modern is just a bunch of shit. Really, the old world never left and it never will leave – the old world is eternal and the Devil is real. That’s fuckin’ terrifying, man. That’s the pitch blackest horror there is. The Exorcist takes our changing, atheistic and unchristian world and turns it upside down.

The expression on their faces sums up the movie for me: pure fear masked by a shaky confidence in science and manmade inventions, even though what lies beneath the Earth is about to take over. Terrifying.

So yeah, I guess I should talk about the Regan devil-possession scenes…they’re pretty damned gross. I don’t think these scenes by themselves are anything that scary as much as they are disturbing. I mean, especially if you don’t like people vomiting up green bile. In that case, don’t watch Troll 2. You’ll probably have an aneurysm.

There's one for the family photo albums!

These scenes are just crazy. I mean, there’s one scene where she scuttles down the stairs backwards with her mouth bleeding. I don’t think there’s enough antibiotics in the world for that. Plus, this scene comes on the tails of Regan discovering that her director friend is dead and that Regan’s doctors can’t help her. Jesus. Can this woman’s life get any worse? Why not just add in the fact that she doesn’t get to appear in the sequel to the mix?

Oh, well, that last one – probably a plus…but still:

So we get some scenes of this detective guy who looks like a drunk, out-of-work Paul Newman investigating Father Karras – ironically, he says Father Karras looks like Paul Newman. Maybe having Paul Newman in this movie wouldn’t have been a bad idea. You could have had him be the possessed one. That would be something…especially if he played the role of the daughter just like Linda Blair does. I’m not going to post a picture of that, but just let it sit in your mind for a while: a little girl contracts an otherworldly possession and turns into Paul Newman. Terrifying.

And yes, I fully realize the above passage will never be entered into the annals of my all-time funniest jokes on the blog. Shut up. The detective guy’s only character seems to be inviting the people he interrogates to go see movies with him. I guess it’s supposed to be a way to try and bribe them, but I dunno; I’m more inclined to think he just has no friends after letting the killer in 12 Angry Men go free.

Well I never!

Either way he doesn’t get very far, and the movie mostly focuses on Chris’s attempts to save Regan. She finally consults with Father Karras, who has become a tortured soul after his mother passed away. Karras takes her seriously enough to start an investigation into whether or not Regan’s case merits an exorcism.

This is yet another difference from most other movies that took influence from The Exorcist: these scenes actually take their time and feel realistic. The Church above all is not just some transparent entity that lets people do whatever they want – there are rules. And very few times – much less in films like The Possession, The Devil Inside or The Conjuring – would they actually just allow an exorcism. But here we have the exception: this is the case that throws everyone for a loop, that proves the Church wrong after years of nothing, here’s another exorcism they have to do, nestled in this modern agnostic world.

Movies today just treat exorcisms like any other everyday thing: “Oh, damn, time for another exorcism again. Want to meet for coffee after?” Just try and tell me with a straight face that any of the scenes in The Conjuring that try and make this idea suspenseful are any good. Fucking please. This is the real deal. Here it feels like things matter. You, the viewer, feel the weight of Karras’s discovery and of the decision to perform the exorcism. That matters a lot.

They recruit Father Merrin, who was the old man from the opening, to come and help out. Apparently because Merrin has so much experience after almost dying the last time he did an exorcism. How do you think that conversation went? “Hey, Father Merrin…remember that time you almost died doing that extremely dangerous exorcism? …Want to do it again?” How rude.

So then we get the exorcism scenes, which are great in part just because any movie that can make two guys standing over a wrinkled Muppet reject and shouting “The power of Christ compels you!” suspenseful is doing something right.

"And for my next trick, I'll make a sequel without any logic or sense in it whatsoever!"

But we quickly find out that it doesn’t work as well as they’d like. Karras tries, but the demon in Regan just won’t let him forget his dearly departed mother, channeling her at every turn to rattle him. Karras has to go downstairs, and when he comes back up, Father Merrin has been killed by the demon. Losing control, Karras goes and strangles Regan until the demon leaves her and comes into him instead. Then he jumps out a window and dies, ending the demon’s reign of terror forever…or until the two sequels came out. But either way, hurray!

The ending does raise some interesting questions though – they went through all that ritualistic bullshit when the real way to beat the demon was just to strangle it out with your bare hands? How stupid they must be feeling now! Ha ha…a good man just lost his life. But seriously though. I really do like the subtext here: religion isn’t all-powerful, the Church isn’t all-knowing. In place of a holy, sacrosanct ritual, it’s blunt violence that wins the day in this movie. That’s pretty important.

And it’s a very important movie. As gruesome and unpleasant as The Exorcist can be, it really is a prime example of horror working outside its bounds and making something artistic and meaningful, while still being scary and suspenseful. It’s the best of both worlds, and an all-time classic. If you’ve never seen this, and are enamored with its pale imitators…well, you need to treat yourself to this movie this Halloween. Whether or not you agree with me that its modern-day imitators are crap, there is no denying the power of The Exorcist.

Happy Halloween!

Images copyright of their original owners.