Spinning heads, cascades of pea soup and your mother's Army boots are nowhere to be found in Exorcist: The Beginning, but lovers of the ridiculous may be delighted to know that the specter of little Linda Blair a-twitch and a-tremble is not entirely forgotten. A prequel to The Exorcist, William Friedkin's 1973 shocker in which Blair played a child hijacked by Beelzebub, this new film comes gussied up with some fine talent and its very own bag of cheap tricks. But when push comes to demonic shove, hell apparently hath no fury like a woman in green pancake makeup just as surely as some producers have no shame.
Exorcist: The Beginning is the third feature film to be squeezed from the pulpy remains of Friedkin's original. (That film spawned two less-acclaimed sequels, and four years ago it was re-released in theaters with some padding and tweaks.)
Based on the William Peter Blatty best seller, the first Exorcist mostly entails the efforts of two priests trying to beat the devil out of Blair's 12-year-old with the aid of pop metaphysics and some exceedingly dated special effects. A monster hit and very effective for a certain teenager who must remain nameless, Friedkin's film has not held up well, but compared with this latest effort does vaguely resemble the classic of 1970s cinema its fans tout it as.
Exorcist: The Beginning was directed by Renny Harlin, whose previous efforts include a solid Nightmare on Elm Street sequel, a bad Die Hard sequel and the diverting thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight. Slick and devoid of any obvious personal signature, Harlin's directorial style is serviceable enough for a movie like Exorcist: The Beginning, which exists solely to rake in cash during its opening weekend and settle into a long shelf-life in the DVD hereafter.
As it happens, the DVD release will be more interesting than the theatrical one if, as floated in Variety, it includes the version of this prequel shot by the director Paul Schrader. Schrader was fired from the project on grounds that his prequel was not scary. Schrader, in turn, had replaced the film's initial director, John Frankenheimer, who died during preproduction.
All this background noise, alas, turns out to be more interesting than what has managed to finally make it on to the screen. Written by Alexi Hawley, who was brought in to revamp William Wisher and Caleb Carr's earlier screenplay, Exorcist: The Beginning opens centuries ago with a priest stumbling through a landscape littered with bloodied corpses and the writhing bodies of the soon to be dead. From there it's a fast cut to Cairo circa 1949, where amid the putatively exotic third-world sights and sounds the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard sits in a bar wearing the rumpled white suit and anomie of a B-movie hero. This world-weary traveler is, of course, Merrin, the same character played by the Swedish actor Max von Sydow in The Exorcist, but now without the sanctity of the priestly collar.
What ensues essentially conforms to the movie horror manual, though the production does benefit from the talents of the Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who has given the film a nice nicotine-stain patina. Wrapped in this burnished orange glow, Merrin, having taken a mysterious assignment, creases his brow and tries to discover what a Catholic church is doing buried in the sand in northern Kenya, which is where most of the film's 117 draggy minutes play out. Along for the ride are the usual movie suspects, including a beautiful doctor with peek-a-boo decolletage and a fondness for late-night showering (Izabella Scorupco), a young priest straight from the Vatican (James D'Arcy), a helpful local with a bull's-eye fixed to his forehead (Andrew French) and various other sacrificial lambs, including children, all of whom are lovingly skewered with graphic detail.
Despite the body count and Harlin's reliance on shock cuts and loud noises, Exorcist: The Beginning singularly fails to deliver any palpable shivers. Perhaps more expectedly, given the torturous production history and the unceremonious introduction of the movie (the studio didn't screen the film for critics until the night before it opened), it does afford the occasional and presumably unintended laugh.
Still, despite the risible dialogue, the bulging eyeballs, the heaving bosoms, the digitally rendered hyenas and squirming maggots, the movie fails to achieve the status of the instant camp classic. That's partly because the vibe of the film is too torpid. It simply doesn't have the buoyancy of camp, but mostly because it's deeply unpleasant to watch children, even fictional children, murdered on the altar of greed. Thrills rarely get cheaper or more loathsome.
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
Indigenous Truku doctor Yuci (Bokeh Kosang), who resents his father for forcing him to learn their traditional way of life, clashes head to head in this film with his younger brother Siring (Umin Boya), who just wants to live off the land like his ancestors did. Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟) opens with Yuci as the man of the hour as the village celebrates him getting into medical school, but then his father (Nolay Piho) wakes the brothers up in the middle of the night to go hunting. Siring is eager, but Yuci isn’t. Their mother (Ibix Buyang) begs her husband to let
In late December 1959, Taiwan dispatched a technical mission to the Republic of Vietnam. Comprising agriculturalists and fisheries experts, the team represented Taiwan’s foray into official development assistance (ODA), marking its transition from recipient to donor nation. For more than a decade prior — and indeed, far longer during Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rule on the “mainland” — the Republic of China (ROC) had received ODA from the US, through agencies such as the International Cooperation Administration, a predecessor to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). More than a third of domestic investment came via such sources between 1951
For the past century, Changhua has existed in Taichung’s shadow. These days, Changhua City has a population of 223,000, compared to well over two million for the urban core of Taichung. For most of the 1684-1895 period, when Taiwan belonged to the Qing Empire, the position was reversed. Changhua County covered much of what’s now Taichung and even part of modern-day Miaoli County. This prominence is why the county seat has one of Taiwan’s most impressive Confucius temples (founded in 1726) and appeals strongly to history enthusiasts. This article looks at a trio of shrines in Changhua City that few sightseers visit.
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