'I'm waiting for her head to spin 'round...'

Film He mentioned the difficulties he was having writing the synopsis the other day on the radio, but now we can all glory in Exorcist: The Beginning as reviewed by Exorcist expert Mark Kermode. Forget the usual sobering look at a film from Sight and Sound, a magazine which found positive things to say about Pokemon: The First Movie:

"Harlin's hamfisted horror-show offers an hour and a half of tooth-grinding boredom followed by 20 minutes of all-singing, all-dancing, knees-up stupidity involving supernatural wrestling, CGI spiderwalking and the kind of drop-your-popcorn demonic dialogue ("Don't you want to stick your rotten cock up my juicy ass?") not heard since Showgirls. If only the Exorcist-spoof Repossessed (1990) had been half as funny."

He also talks about the history of the film in The Guardian:

"Schrader showed his first cut of the movie to Morgan Creek - and all hell broke loose. According to press reports, executives were outraged by the lack of shocks and gore, prompting Schrader to speculate that they hadn't actually read the script. Things turned nastier still when a widely circulated 'private' email attributed to Caleb Carr accused the director of conjuring 'one of the most inept, amateur, utterly flat excuses for a film that has ever been concocted' and declared that the film would only be salvageable with 'another 10 million in reshoots'."

In the radio version of his review he said that he hasn't seen the Schrader version yet, but that even if it's a blank screen for an hour and a half it can't be as bad as the Renny Harlin. Harsh.

[Incidentally, The Exorcist Revisited is a weblog about the films and features new photos the actual locations.]