Renny Harlin's pokey, blood-spattered, cheap-scare-larded prequel tells the story of disillusioned Father Lankester Merrin — the veteran expeller of demons played by Max von Sydow in THE EXORCIST (1973) — whose faith was lost in Nazi-occupied Holland and recovered in British postcolonial Africa. The sixth-century prologue establishes a tone of garish cruelty: A lone priest, disheveled and traumatized, wanders through a dusty sea of corpses — bludgeoned, impaled, nailed to inverted crosses — and finds a small, grotesque likeness of the demon Pazuzu. Flash forward to 1949: Archeologist Lancaster Merrin (Stellan Skarsgard, who has some of von Sydow's solemn gravity) is ...
Released:
2004
Rated:
R
Length:
100 mins