i have dreams of a rose and falling down a long flight of stairs, or ten reasons i love the exorcist III

*warning: some spoilers ahead*

Stop comparing it to the original. Nothing's that good.

That said, I see your point. Here is copious cheese: witness the garden shears, the corny banter, the Theodicy-for-Dummies dialogue, the Christ statue that gasp! opens its eyes! These things and more are groan-inducing.

But come with me and I'll give you a tour through some of the very satisfying elements in this all-too-readily-dismissed sequel.

I. CRAFTSMANSHIP: William Peter Blatty directed and adapted the script from his own book, Legion. The directing is unexpectedly strong, the script curiously weak. I'll tell you what saves it: the cast (George C. Scott, Ed Flanders, Nancy Fish, Viveca Lindfors, Jason Miller, Nicol Willliamson, Brad Dourif, Scott Wilson, etc) and the grand visual style. My hat goes off to DP (Gerry Fisher) and editors (Todd Ramsay and Peter Lee Thompson) and sound editor (Richard L. Anderson). Like the story or not, the film is a thing of beauty.

II. THE AESTHETICS OF BLOOD: Blatty likes his blood to creep, not splatter. It creeps across floorboards, it creeps out from under doors and down the faces of statues. He uses the movement of blood as a pacing device: this film moves at a rate of creeping suspense made dynamic by the sparing use of sudden, violent cuts.

III. STILL-LIFE: He wields stillness like a weapon. There is a wonderful static shot from the head of the staircase (YOU know the staircase I mean) in which all is still but a single sheet of newspaper which blows in a frenzy all the way to the top. He likes to linger on Catholic things: a rosary falling into shadow, a confessional, the menacing impassivity of statues. He very much enjoys a series of beautifully-constructed still-lifes, and so do I.

IV. SILENCE: He appreciates the power of a sudden silence. In my favorite example, a bird inexplicably dies in mid-song.

V. ANGLES: Things get photographed from extreme angles, from crazy heights and depths, resulting in a world of grotesque gothic majesty.

VI. MY FAVORITE SUSPENSE SCENE: It's in the middle of the film, maybe five minutes long, done almost entirely in an extreme and static long-shot. It's late night at the hospital. You know the killer is going to strike, he's told you so, and it comes clear soon enough who his victim will be. A guard enters, exchanges pleasantries, leaves. Ice cracking in a glass makes a heart-stopping sound. A patient wakes and rages. Somebody goes to a vending machine and gets a drink. By the time the shock comes--suddenly, just a second's worth of shock--the suspense, as Willy Wonka once said, is terrible.

VII. THE DEPOT-OF-THE-DEAD DREAM SEQUENCE: What do these three humans have in common: Patrick Ewing, Fabio, and Samuel L. Jackson? They're all hanging out in the Depot-of-the-Dead, that's what, playing, respectively, the Angel of Death, an angel who looks like Fabio, and a cranky blind man who says, "The living are deaf."

VIII. THE INCOMPARABLE BRAD DOURIF: He's like an archetype. Sometimes nobody else will do, and this seems to me the quintessential role of his mid-career period (post-Flannery O'Connor, pre-Wormtongue/Deadwood). Someone from the X-Files must have thought so, too, because they lifted the whole plot-device and recast him in the same role. I love that the camera stays still and lets him act straight into the lens. The lines aren't great and a lesser actor would've embarrassed us, but Dourif is a pleasure to watch.

IX. THE ATMOSPHERE IN THE GEMINI KILLER'S CELL: It is the sort of change that was so well-realized in the first film (in the hallway everything's normal then you open the door to Regan's room and find yourself in hell). Blatty does it with lighting, and again, cold, but mostly it's done with sound: the quiet in the room has thickness, a density, accentuated by dripping water and low, ambient roars. The killer's voice is modulated, the speed and pitch distorted just enough to punch up the weirdness, not enough to distract.

X. THE EXORCISM SCENE: It's succinct, hallucinatory, and the two actors (Nicol Williamson and Jason Miller) are well-matched, neither heading too far into the scenery-chewing stratosphere. I appreciate that we never hear Father Morning (Williamson) speak prior to the scene except in prayer. My heart lurches every time Father Karras shouts, "Now! Bill! Do it now! Kill me now!"

IN SUMMATION: it's not a great film, but it is hypnotic, and the sound is gorgeous. It's had a bum rap for a lot of years, and it's time, in the wake of the sheer excrement Rennie Harlan gave us a few years back (for which he will occupy a special room in hell which I will happily decorate for him if given the chance) and the near-excrement we got from Paul Schrader after that, to shake the dust off the thing and give it another run. You think you're uncomfortable visiting grandma in her nursing home now? After this one, my friend, you'll have one paranoid eye clamped on the ceiling every time you walk through the door.