Brad Dourif Month Begins a Day Early With The Exorcist III, My Shudder Pick on the Month
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
One of the best things about having your own website is that you can ostensibly do whatever the hell you want to do. How fucking cool is that? Freedom, baby, what could be more American than that? Other than, you know, all of the bad things that come with being an American and having a website that stubbornly refuses to become more popular or lucrative no matter what you do?
To quote Ned Flanders’ parents, we haven’t tried anything to become popular here at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, and we’re all out of options.
I answer only to the angry voices inside my head, my readers, and particularly the patrons who have very generously paid me to write about various television shows and movies.
One of these kind souls has commissioned a series where I write about a film available on the popular horror streaming site Shudder each month.
Because I can do what I want here at the Happy Place, I’ve decided to make January Brad Dourif month. Brad Dourif month begins a day early because The Exorcist III is on Shudder.
I’m not sure why it has taken me forty-eight years to finally see The Exorcist III. It is a notable cult film and the only sequel, reboot, prequel, or follow-up to The Exorcist that is not widely considered an embarrassment.
The Exorcist III is the only well-regarded sequel to one of the most important, beloved, and terrifying horror movies of all time. More importantly, it is a weird fucking movie. Bonkers. Nutty.
How nutty? I have two words for you: Fabio cameo. Not enough? I have three more words for you: Patrick Ewing cameo.
That’s right. The second official sequel to The Exorcist features surprise appearances from the romance novel cover hunk as well as the NBA superstar, who, I just discovered, interned at Robert Dole’s office when he was in college. Who knew?
Neither Ewing nor Fabio have any dialogue. That would have been silly! They’re joined by Kevin Corrigan, Samuel L. Jackson, C. Everett Koop, Larry King, and the Lennon Sisters as angels. You can’t have a proper horror movie without all manner of kooky stunt casting.
It should be noted that I am writing about The Exorcist III, a well-regarded cult movie, and not Repossessed, the poorly regarded parody of The Exorcist that was released a month after The Exorcist III and received a zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
I would have seen The Exorcist III earlier if I’d realized how bonkers it is. It is crazier than a shithouse rat and nuttier than a squirrel’s diet.
It helps to think of it less as a sequel to The Exorcist than as a follow-up to Blatty’s 1980 directorial debut The Ninth Configuration. Though it was inconveniently released at the beginning of the Reagan decade, The Ninth Configuration has all the hallmarks of a New Hollywood provocation.
The Ninth Configuration is one of the kookiest and most daring films ever released by a Hollywood studio. It’s audacious even by New Hollywood standards.
Blatty sees The Exorcist III as the third and final entry in his “Trilogy of Faith”, a series that began with The Exorcist, continued with The Ninth Configuration and concluded here.
The Exorcist III shares with The Ninth Configuration a sense of the universe as fundamentally insane, even if we pretend otherwise.
We act as if laws, morality, and logic govern the world as a way of denying the painful truth that everything is random, chaotic, and meaningless. And that’s on a good day!
Before he was a zeitgeist-capturing bestselling horror novelist and then a horror screenwriter and a horror director, Blatty co-wrote A Shot in the Dark, the best Pink Panther movie, and wrote comic novels like John Goldfarb Please Come Home!
One of the many wonderful things about The Exorcist III is that it is an exorcism-themed horror movie that, in its first hour, seems deeply uninterested in being a horror movie and exorcisms.
The Exorcism III opens instead as a police procedural that focuses on Lieutenant William F. Kinderman, a police officer who was played by Lee J. Cobb in the original film and George C. Scott here, and his relationship with Father Joseph Dyer, who was played by real-life priest Father William O’Malley in William Friedkin’s Oscar-winning classic and Ed Flanders here.
The cop and the priest have a wonderfully lived-in relationship. They have an ease with one another that can only be the result of a long and intimate friendship.
Blatty writes Lieutenant Kinderman as a cop who talks like a poet with a keen sense of life’s fundamental ridiculousness. Father Dyer is every bit as ingratiatingly eccentric. These men of distinction talk for the sake of talking but also because they enjoy both their own wit and each other’s delightful company.
In perhaps the strangest moment in a most unusual motion picture, Father Dyer quotes, at one point, “May the Schwartz be with you” to his police officer pal.
Scott’s charismatic cop is haunted by the death of Damien Karras, the exorcist Jason Miller played in The Exorcist.
The man of God threw himself down a long flight of stairs to defeat the demon possessing Linda Blair’s Reagan McNeil. Father Damien martyred himself to beat the devil. So Lieutenant Kinderman is alarmed when a series of brutal murders are committed with unmistakable religious connotations, like a black boy who is decapitated and then has his head replaced with the defaced head of a Jesus statue.
It appears that a serial killer known as The Gemini Killer (modeled on real-life serial killer The Zodiac Killer, who praised The Exorcist in one of his letters to the police) is up to his old tricks again.
The Gemini Killer was executed fifteen years earlier, but that barely seems to have slowed him down. Our hero visits a mental hospital where the body of a possessed Father Karras (played by Jason Miller, yet billed as “Patient X”) is possessed by the malevolent spirit of the Gemini Killer.
Brad Dourif plays James Venamun, AKA The Gemini Killer, and the evil spirit occupying Father Karras’ body and soul in one of his best roles and most terrifying performances.
Dourif had a very big 1990. He’s far and away the best part of the Stephen King adaptation Graveyard Shift, in which he plays a lunatic exterminator who is way too into his job and delivers a mesmerizing monologue about his time in Vietnam and the horrible things that can be done to a human body.
Graveyard Shift is exuberant trash. The Exorcist III is more artful. It gives Dourif a much better-written monologue about the horrible things that can be done to a human body.
With the devil’s misplaced pride, Dourif’s hellish monster talks lovingly about the joys of murdering random people as painfully as possible.
That’s the thing about Dourif: he seems at once angelic and demonic. That makes sense, considering that Lucifer was once God’s favorite angel.
Dourif made his name embodying innocence and vulnerability in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest before becoming a preeminent horror icon.
Scott is one of the most commanding actors in film history. The Exorcist III gives him a role worthy of his extraordinary gifts. Yet Dourif is so mesmerizing in his scenes here that you forget that Scott exists when he's onscreen.
Dourif is a virtuoso. The Exorcist III gives him multiple mesmerizing monologues where he holds the audience’s attention for minutes at a time. Dourif makes you believe in the devil. He makes you believe in evil. He makes you believe in the reality and verisimilitude of an oddball horror movie that references Spaceballs and has a dream sequence with Fabio and Patrick Ewing.
Like The Ninth Configuration, The Exorcist III begins as a dark comedy about the absurdity of existence and faith before becoming an even darker thriller.
The Exorcist III feels like it’d prefer to forego exorcisms but felt obligated to throw in at least one exorcism to be on-brand.
The exorcism is anti-climactic, partly because it is performed by Father Paul Morning (Nicol Williamson), a character who barely factors into the proceedings otherwise.
Sure enough, Blatty wanted to make an Exorcist movie without an exorcism, but the studio forced a third-act exorcism on him. The Director’s Cut, which I wish I watched instead, has a different ending.
To Dourif, that grudging commercial concession ruined the film. He thought of The Exorcist as nothing more than mediocre.
He’s wrong. Dourif’s performance alone makes The Exorcist III worth seeing. In a life and career full of scene-stealing performances, it deserves to be singled out for acclaim.
I’m glad I finally caught up with The Exorcist III. It’s a wonderfully wacky way to end a devil of a year and an appropriately eccentric way to begin our month (and a day!)-long celebration of Dourif.
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