UNBELIEVABLE

Opening in theaters this week:

The Exorcist: Believer--Two 13-year-old girls go missing one day after school. Their panicked parents, single Dad Victor (Leslie Odom, Jr.) and evangelical couple Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz) frantically search their Georgia suburb, but three days later the girls turn up alive.

These early scenes of this sixth Exorcist follow-up are tense and gripping, convincingly dramatizing a dread familiar to parents, but also deploying a few well-executed cheap scares. Soon after the girls reappear, they start showing unmistakable signs of demonic possession. The nonbelieving Victor is skeptical at first, but before long he has enlisted the aid of Chris McNeil (the radiant Ellen Burstyn), who went through a similar experience with her daughter Regan up in Georgetown half a century earlier.

Act Two of Believer is mostly devoted to a rather ecumenical exorcism, with Catholics, Evangelicals and what appear to be Voodoo practitioners all participating, among others. This section falls flat. We get all the obligatory stuff--levitation, projectile tummy trouble--but none of the elliptical yet grueling intensity that the late William Friedkin brought to the 1973 film. Put simply, the second half of the movie just isn't very scary.

Part of what made the first film so potent was its harsh, judgy small-c conservative Catholicism. It seemed to suggest that Chris McNeil's worldly career and single life left the door open for the devil to take her daughter. The new film almost gets this right; it implies that Victor's daughter's yearning to communicate with her dead mom gives the demon a foothold, as Regan playing with a Ouija board invited in "Captain Howdy" back in the original.

But the kum-ba-yah sensibility of Believer's interfaith exorcism weakens this blood-and-thunder atmosphere. Don't misunderstand; I agree, on the whole, with the sentiments expressed in this movie's mild little homilies about faith and community and hope. But I don't think they're the most effective way to scare an audience. Decades ago I had a girlfriend, a lapsed Catholic, who found the original Exorcist so terrifying that she could barely stand to have it mentioned (I used to tease her by imitating the demon's voice).

The new film lacks the ruthlessness that could create that sort of reaction. Nor did I really find it plausible that these staunch traditionalist faiths could practice this archaic rite in harmony. As soon as anything went wrong, wouldn't they start blaming each other?

The director, David Gordon Green, works from a script that he wrote with several hands including Danny McBride. They were the team behind 2021's Halloween Kills, another honorable but unsuccessful revival of a classic horror franchise. The cast here is capable, with one standout--that splendid, always reliable warhorse Ann Dowd as a nurse with a relevant past who befriends Victor.

This much more, if little else, can be said for Believer: although the insolently absurd yet imaginative spectacle of John Boorman's 1977 Exorcist 2: The Heretic has its fascinations, Believer can probably still claim to be the best of the Exorcist sequels. But that's a low bar.

CHI DEVIL WOMAN

If you need an intriguing read for October, you might consider...

...The Case Against Satan, a brief 1962 novel by Ray Russell of Sardonicus fame. Somehow I had never heard of this one, now out in a respectable new edition by Penguin Classics if you please, but it's a gripping fast read, and it seems inarguably influential.

Set in a Roman Catholic rectory in a working-class Chicago neighborhood, Russell's book dramatizes an exorcism. At the time, apparently, this rite was so rarely performed and archaic that it was a novelty to readers it would not be a decade later, after the release of William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel The Exorcist and its 1973 movie adaptation popularized the concept.

In Russell's yarn, the possession victim is a pretty teenage girl. The exorcism is performed by a younger priest with a drinking problem and an interest in psychology and other "modern" ideas; he's supervised by his Bishop, an older, more traditional sort. The victim is bound to a bed, and at one point she has an upset tummy to a projectile degree.

In short, the book has broad resemblances to The Exorcist that seem unmistakable. Unlike Blatty, however, Russell leaves matters ambiguous; the story could, however unconvincingly, be interpreted in non-supernatural terms.

The author's narrative tone toward then-contemporary religious attitudes is snarky and contemptuous, referring, at the novel's opening, to the modern idea of God as "...a nodding Santa Claus with twinkling eyes and a spun glass beard..." and to modern religion as "...an unnatural thing of all light and no shadow, a pious bonbon so nice, so sweet, so soporifically bland that a Karl Marx can call it the opium of the people not without justice..." Russell, who died in 1999, lived long enough to see conservative religious attitudes in our culture swing the other direction; I don't know if he was comforted by this change or not.

I, for one, am fervently hoping for the Nodding Santa Claus. That said, if you're looking for a diabolical tale to pass an autumnal evening, rather than revisiting Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist this year I'd suggest you pick the devil you don't know.

HUMP DAY CLASSICS

If it isn’t already, you may want to make Wednesday your official movie night in June and July. More than 100 locations of Cinemark Theatres around the country will host a Summer Classics series, in conjunction with Warner Bros., Wednesdays from June 6 to July 25, with shows at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. It’s a diverse batch of movies, all worth seeing, or re-seeing. Here’s a schedule:

June 6: The Exorcist (1973): In terms of shock, this highly influential horror favorite, based on William Peter Blatty’s novel, has long since been left in the dust by the ghastliness of contemporary scare films. But the acting, atmosphere and suspense, and the deft direction of William Friedkin, still hold up.

June 13: Citizen Kane (1941): This one’s always mentioned on lists of the greatest movies ever made, and not without reason. Directed, produced and co-written (with Herman Mankiewicz) by Orson Welles, this thinly-veiled, brilliantly-structured fictionalization of the life of William Randolph Hearst can suck you in like a great novel.

June 20: Cool Hand Luke (1967): "What we’ve got here…is failure to communicate.” So, unforgettably, says Strother Martin of his difficulties with Paul Newman, as the intractable title character of this prison yarn. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg, this was one of Newman’s signature vehicles.

June 27: The Searchers (1956): After Stagecoach, this visually beautiful, complex western, about the search for a girl abducted by the Comanche, is probably the most admired of the collaborations between John Ford and John Wayne. Jeffery Hunter and Natalie Wood also star, and Henry Brandon is memorable as the Comanche Scar.

July 4: That’s Entertainment (1974): This compilation of excerpts from vintage MGM musicals is, indeed, entertainment. But you have to wonder—on the Fourth of July, shouldn’t Warner Bros. have shown Yankee Doodle Dandy?

July 11: A Clockwork Orange (1971): Stanley Kubrick’s “ultra-violent” exploration of the limits of free will, based on the futuristic novel by Anthony Burgess, isn’t for kids or the easily sickened. But both the filmmaking and Malcolm McDowell’s performance still pack a punch. Beethoven may never sound the same to you again.

July 18: North By Northwest (1959): One of the most fun of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, this tongue-in-cheek thriller features Cary Grant as a sophisticated New York executive mistaken by murderous spies for their target. It’s best known for the scene in which Grant is strafed by a cropduster, and for the final chase across the face of Mt. Rushmore.

July 25: Cabaret (1972): Bob Fosse re-invented the movie musical with his amazing adaptation of the Kander and Ebb Broadway hit. Liza Minelli and Michael York star, and Joel Grey is unforgettable as the spectral Master of Ceremonies.

The films will be shown here in the Valley at Cinemark 16 in Mesa; in my hometown of Erie they’ll play at Tinseltown USA. For other participating locations, check here.

MOUTHS OF BABES

Saturday evening at The Royale in Mesa, The Midnite Movie Mamacita revives the sick-ass, unforgettable Tom Six film The Human Centipede (First Sequence), in preparation for the meta-sequel, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), out later this month. You can read my review of the first film here, & if you’re not squeamish, see the trailer for the new film here.

A pal directed me these remarkable clips of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, before the voice of Mercedes McCambridge was overdubbed. The finished clips are presented afterwards, for a compare & contrast. What do you think? For me, it truly shows how much McCambridge added to that film.