Touched by a Locust: EXORCIST II, MANHATTAN BABY

The riddle of the locust is that the locust is strong, but steel is stronger, so says (sorta) African locust shaman James Earle Jones in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). It is my unofficial recommendation for this weekend, depending on your state of pan-dimensional inebriation and yen for Italian-style nightmare logic. Mine is stronger, and the riddle of steel, asked by Jones' Stygian serpent shaman in Conan, turns out to be answered a mere six years earlier, in the agitated delirium tremens of that alcoholic Welsh booze shaman, Richard Burton. 

Such is the way timeless/spaceless spirit worlds are run, foaming with coincidence, foreshadowing themselves into the ground and then beyond. And so there is Jones as the combo African doctor / locust shaman in that great hat (above). And there is Dick, the theatrical titan / spent alcoholic serpent, and he's trying to quit, and will, but right now where do you keep your bar cart? FAST!

But before getting involved too deep, know this: Richard Burton's priest is the heretic of the title--he and he alone--there's no fanged demon heretic or something. It's another one of his priest roles, but he's a long way from the Iguanas and the Sandpipers. He's down to the locusts, and after that there's just the straitjacket and the haliperidol and the sweet, sweet lorezapam. This fight is over. The devil loses this round, but so do you. Battling the devil to a draw is the closest thing to victory you'e ever gonna get, cuz the sequels ain't gonna stop, no matter how loud a mic drop John Boorman makes with Exorcist II: The Heretic. It's like he had a movie in mind, realized he'd only get to make it if it was an Exorcist sequel, so made both and jammed them together, threw it on the screen, and ran away, fingers sticking in his ears as he awaits the bang.

I mean, Burton as a priest, again. This towering actor and booze-fume djinn was once, twice, three times. probably more, a priest in film (not even counting his stint as the pedophile-shielding Bishop of Canterbury in Beckett). A weird thing for a drunkard A-list actor to be cast as, a priest. Nine times out of ten, priests are depicted in film as boring old fogeys pooh-poohing, browbeating, boring, and benumbing everyone in earshot (unless they're Irish, of course). Then again, the Burton we get here, so weary from masking his hangover he has to play every line at a 10, just to be heard by the boom mic. He's surly, sullen, cranky, sanctimonious, trading on his collar to excuse his rudeness, hiding his forgetfulness of lines and blocking via sweaty reticence. We wait for each line as if at the DMV. 

In short, Burton in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) is a mess. Whether that's the character he's playing or just the best he can do, it's all less about Regan and more a Lost Weekend of the Locusts witt every evil power in the world clearing the way for a relapse. Which honey, is how it always is. I recognize all the symptoms.

And yet, he's still a pro. Can panicky Welsh alcoholic actor play a priest who touches a demon Tinker Belle locust wing and fly-fly-fly to Africa or/and into the arms of a demonic but still underage Linda Blair, there to try to kill her, molest her, and devour her at the same time, believably? Or if not, will there be at least some campy hoots to be had? 

Not even. You need to applaud like hell to bring this turning-green fairy back to life, and even then, all it does is crawl woozily along, its wings soggy from having just climbed out of an unlucky patron's highball.

And yet... fall approaches and doomsday December, and the weakness of each SAG member gone to ember turns one's heart to demon mentors (1) and since it's on the Netflix streaming, why not give Exorcist: the Heretic (1977) another chance? 

Boorman's movies are complicated attempts to be genuinely mythic and Jungian-masculine archetypal. In short, all his movies hold up over repeat viewings. Even the worst of his weird wonders are worth giving a second, third, even a sixth chance to. Sometimes it takes that many, for example I finally saw Zardoz all the way through, after years of never making it more than 20 minutes in.And now I lurve it.

Me, I tried myself to watch Heretic only once, years ago, but never got past that first mind-boggling stretch wherein Burton first watches Louise Fletcher hypnotize Regan so she can go back in time to the events in her bedroom during the climax of the last film (he 'needs' to find out how Father Karras died). But then, while still hypnotized, Regan hypnotizes Fletcher, so she can join her there, in the past, then Fletcher--in real time--starts gasping in pain, because Pazuzu is clawing at her beating heart, in the past. So Burton tells still hypnotized Regan to hypnotize him so he can go back and rescue Fletcher, as if pulling some Dreamscape/Inception-style invasion is as easy as wearing a biorhythm feedback headband and staring into a flashing light for two seconds. As Fletcher says, "slow your tone!" 

In the original film's time (1973), Regan's full-on Pazuzu devil make-up was being worn by a different actress, and seeing that same actress back, massaging Fletcher's naked heart, is pretty wild. Fletcher gasps and chokes and 'arghs'... over and over and over... I mean she's the slowest time traveling demon-forced heart attack in cinema history! Pazuzu/Regan stares at the newly arrived Burton with a lewd obscene grin, while still pumping on Fletcher's heart, wanting him to draw a breast squeezing parallel. The minutes drag by as Fletcher moans, Regan grins and Burton watches, horrified, trapped in Regan's double's evil licentious eyes.

Minute-after-minute passes....moaning... lewd staring.... shocked paralysis... moaning... staring.... 

Fletcher begs Burton to do something, anything to help.... the massaging continues. Pazuzu/Regan, massaging Fletcher's exposed heart, stares lewdly at him, STILL squeezing her heart as if fondling her breast, bidding him with her eyes to make it a macabre trans-dimensional threesome.

Finally, after the moment plays on so long you think the editor must have fallen asleep, Burton feebly croaks "in God's name," with nary a shred of holy conviction, and that's the end - Pazuzu fades away. 

In God's name indeed.

I, like so many before me stopped watching then and there. Regan, turn it off! In God's name, not another minute! 

Later, Blair and Burton meet at the Natural History Museum, perhaps to blur the line between its dioramas and the film's later unconvincing (but all the more interesting for it) matte work during the Africa scenes and soundstage suburban cul-de-sac.

But last night I held on all the way, maybe because since that first disastrous attempt I've seen a lot more 70s Italian horror films, and had my own alcoholic battle with the devil, and--most importantly--I've fallen under the demonic sway of ace composer Ennio Morricone. I didn't even know he scored Heretic until his unique Italian counterpointing started around midway through the picture, almost as a reward for my patience. I didn't even have to check the credits to know it was him. A minute of that score and I knew things were about to get awesome. It's like Ennio watched and waited til the parents and wallies left the party before he busted out his stash and stole the liquor cabinet keys from dad's study. I don't think there's even any music before then, so when it comes it's like a paycheck for our labor. 

Maybe it's just because he's so affiliated with 70s Italian horror, but Morricone's score triggers a weird glaze of surrealism and tolerance, allowing we fans of weird Italian movies to see what some critics might dub 'stupidity' but is really dream logic.  With Morricone's help and a rich introduction to Italian horror, maybe y'all can learn to experience Heretic as I just finally did, not as an official sequel to the original Exorcist but as an Italian rip-off. And on that level, it's an instant faux classic. Just pretend all the lines are dubbed, and that you're tripping with Richard Pryor (1) at a New York City grindhouse. The bliss will follow.

There's one Italian Exorcist knock-off in particular I'm thinking of, which would make a fine Heretic double bill or it too mixes ESP, astral travel, mysterious shamans, possessed children, and North African scenery. Lucio Fulci's oddly-titled 1982 film Manhattan Baby (3) involves a mysterious amulet given by a mysterious old lady to a young tourist girl named Susie (Brigitta Boccoli) visiting Egypt with her parents, right around the same time her papa (Italian genre favorite Christopher Connelly) finds a mysterious secret panel in an old tomb that takes him face-to-face with a similar jewel embedded in a wall - which zaps him in the eyes, blinding him. Susie takes the jewel home to their Manhattan apartment--never telling the parents--or presumably customs. Back in NYC, she and her brother (blonde moppet mainstay Giovanni Frezza) are soon 'voyaging' to Egypt via portals opened up in their bedroom by the jewel, coming back with weird Anubis figurines and scorpions and tracking sand all over their room. Meanwhile, people in NYC who help the parents find answers wind up dead via animal attacks or mysterious elevator accidents. In short, Baby fills in the gaps left in the original Exorcist's parallel stories, The Omen, and of course Ride with the Devil, and Rosemary's Baby (the all-knowing antiques dealer/psychic is named Adrian Mercato). It addresses the issues that Heretic never even mentions, namely why/how Father Merrin's archeological dig in Iraq is responsible for Regan's possession in Georgetown, DC. Is there a dimensional doorway between the Iraqi desert and Regan's bedroom, as there is here between Manhattan and Egypt? (see Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #3, 2007 - The Exorcist in Iraq). All I know is, Pazuzu tries that bush league stuff in Brooklyn, he'll get his face bit off, his ass kicked, and be forced to  possess Red Hook hipsters and pay astronomical rent.

One thing that's especially cool is the unspoken generation gap which is very very familiar if you're Gen-X: the kids don't bother to tell their parents anything about their travels--they try once and are just snapped at for lying. So the kids spend the bulk of their time with their au pair (Cynzia du Ponti) running amok in Central Park. It's both frustrating and hilarious that the Egyptologist dad never once notices the amulet he's been searching for all his life, the twin to the one that blinded him baack in Egypt, is right there around his daughter's neck. It's an ironic comment on paying attention to what's right in front of you and a reminder that, in the 70s, kids roamed free like wild animals. The parents do their thing--bridge, wife-swapping, cocktails, golf--and the kids do theirs--soaping windows, stealing candy, traversing ghostly doorway to Egyptian temples, murdering irritating chuckleheads, and staring mutely into space. Everyone minds their own business, except the birds. Even stuffed with sawdust, the birds aren't having it. In Fulci-ville, not one eyeball is safe. The movie's almost over and the eye-pecking is almost an afterthought, like he realized he hadn't popped a single eyeball, the Fucli signature!

Since it's Italian, and by Fulci, the score is by Fabio Frizzi, some of which is imported from other movies. It has a wondrous habit of mimicking the screams and other sounds in the film, incorporating them into the music, so you can't easily tell which is which (Fulci without Frizzi would be like Sergio without Ennio). 

That's dream logic at its best, living on the huge fuzzy lack of line between what's intentional and what's accidental.  When du Ponti's screaming face is alternated with shots of a cobra slithering around on an indoor floor, you don't know how they connect--they never occupy the same shot. Is she seeing the cobra in her bedroom, is seeing it in some alternate dimension, is it menacing the kids, waiting on the other side of the locked door she's trying get into, or are they meant as some symbolc analogy,  or none of the above? And when mom (Laura Lenzi!) walks into the kids' room to find her missing pet douchebag from work and looks down in shock, is there really a sandy desert on their floor, was it an arial shot of the desert merged with the carpet, or just well-done sand and is Lenzi really touching it? What connects with what? Like some combo of Antonio Antonioni and Doris Wishman, this disconnect helps us wrestle with the very fabric of how our brain literally can not stop looking for patterns and meaning in the randomness of their ink blot reality, and by being made aware of it through exposed artifice we get two rewards: the realization that our unconscious mind likes to fill in gaps, can make the most random images connect, and how deeply our ingrained love of narrative is what constitutes not just our ability to distract ourselves from the terrors of existence, but our very selves. Even we don't really hang together -- any resemblance between us and our seamless 'conscious' selves is purely coincidental 

Let's now bring this chain back to the beloved James Earle Jones as a Dr. Benway-esque African etymologist dealing with locust plagues (top and below), a man who is simultaneously both a trippy locust-shaman and a sober scientist working on ways to stop the swarms that regularly wipe out crops all across his native continent.  I kept hoping he'd give Burton a flask of yellow bug powder so he could go around knocking on doors shouting "Exterminator!" and zapping Pazuzu's locust buddies in between zapping himself with that delish bug powder, that his priestly collar turns into a black locust with a patch of white on its forehead, calling him "Dick" in a gravelly anus voice. But you can't have everything. At least it's easier to believe Jones is a multi-dimensional locust shaman than it is to believe Burton's a priest or that anyone in this film is ever really in Africa instead of just looking around behind or in front of a lot of backdrops. If you've ever had a fever or done psychedelics or read any Phillip K. Dick then you know that simultaneous multi-dimensional existence is doable, and the world does look like terrarium miniatures once your senses are unmoored from normal space/time, and for awhile Jones makes it all seem cohesive. The way he effortlessly grasps Burton's lost, mangy situation on both fronts at the same time is pretty tripped out, and the highlight of the film. 

The problem with Heretic is... and I hate to say this because I'm a huge huge fan of his drinking (and sometimes his acting), Burton. He must be in the throes of serious alcoholism, unable to see straight in order to read cue cards, otherwise there's no reason he'd be so silent and sullen, so willing to waste time hoping his pauses come off as pregnant with gravitas. Half the time he just ignores or doesn't answer direct questions posed by everyone from Regan to train conductors, like he's sulking because director Boorman promised him a drink that morning and he's still waiting!

As the hours, the takes, the time fritters by, his shakes commence. To paraphrase the reverend he played in Night of the Iguana, "That's when the spook moves in." Burton at least got some poppy seed tea in that film, something to ease him off the ledge during his impromptu intervention, but he's pretty cut off in Heretic, and as the shakes come he tries to pass them off as holy madness, seizing his one chance at a diegetic libation by greedily gulping down a proffered goblet of sacramental wine, which he only gets after he's climbed atop the holy cliff in Africa during some sacred locust-defying ritual. But as any alcoholic knows, one mere slam of wine when suffering booze withdrawal is only allaying the shakes by an hour, tops. Lucky for Burton, he gets stoned (literally) by the locals before heading back home down the cliff (every suffering alcoholic longs for unconsciousness). Later he starts abusing Blair, feebly shoving her against a wall over and over in a futile attempt to kill her --death by feeble shoving! It's one of the most embarrassing displays of Satanic possession in cinema. Finally he succumbs to delirium tremens, and "locusts" start swarming all around him. Richard, Richard... Richard... there are no locusts, they're DT hallucinations! Or did you cause them somehow, hallucinate them into space/time existence?

Why couldn't you have stopped at a liquor store? You got money... not like poor Ray Milland in Lost Weekend, stuck with his bat and his mouse and his empty bottles.

Taken in whole, it makes a fine interpretation of the Catholic holy 'stations' since withdrawal is not unlike  crucifixion--and is sometimes referred to as 'the crucifixion cruise.'

 The 7 Stations of a Dry Burton

Station 1: Early morning Hangover
(coasting on fumes)

Station 2: Mounting dread (preliminary withdrawal)

Station 3:
Panic (shakes)

Station 4:
Brief Reprieve (sacrament)

Station 5: 
locust swarm (delirium tremens)

Station 6
total breakdown (crack-up) /seduced by a girl under 20
(see also Sue Lyon)

Station 8
Psych-ward (detox)

Terrible acting by Burton aside, all the wonky ESP / New York City skyscraper / Natural History Museum / locust management / possession / end of the world interlocking vibes are fun. If you can stick out the whole first half as it dithers around the city, eventually a real movie kicks in. Burton is determined to drag Regan back to Washington to face her old bedroom. The devil wants that too, and sends outburst of crazy weather and freak accidents in the path of Regan's annoying psychiatrist (Louise Fletcher) as she lumbers after them to stop this nonsense. We're rooting for the devil! For awhile it seems like the apocalypse is coming just to stop her: Fletcher's plane almost crashes; she gets stuck in DC traffic (a nightmare to rival the DTs); she crashes; her assistant gets possessed. But she will not stop coming. For awhile it seems like all of Washington DC is melting and time is standing still in a ground zero of Satanic panic just to f--k with her. Whoa! 

Things finally become so weird all the slogging nonsense of the first hour and a half pays off and a real apocalypse vibe comes along. Time stands still on a giant indoor set meant to represent the cul-de-sac in front of Regan's old house (which as we know was originally a brownstone that looked nothing like this); locusts swarm and cars crash and her house burns down, and suddenly the night seems unnaturally still and quiet is worthy of Val Lewton, or Edgar G. Ulmer! Man, Boorman, why the hell didn't you start with that?

Forget about logic. Forget about comparing the sequel to the original, just appreciate the dark, fuzzy, muted cinematography of William Fraker (Rosemary's Baby), turn up the Morricone and pretend it's Fulci's wing that's touching you instead of Boorman's. Suddenly it all clicks into place. I don't know about you, but it took me forever to love most of his films, many viewings, so I wonder if, when I see Heretic again one day, I'll suddenly go down like a warm blast of whiskey from a desert wanderer's flask, and I won't let Burton's surly agitation and associative A-list importance drive me away. I've already seen Manhattan Baby three times, and they're alike as two sister craft. Peep the shots down below and see if you can guess which ones are from Fulci's Manhattan Baby and which from Exorcist 2. 

The answer... may surprise you!

 

 

Answers:Heretic - 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 13  / Manhattan- 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11

See Also:

"My Night of the Iguana" - 5/24/10

Bad Acid 70s-80s, Part III: Drive-In Dream Logic, Italian-style! 

Snap went the Dragon! THE SANDPIPER (1965)  12/8/08

NOTES:
1. 1, yeah I'm a poet, so what? I'm Gen-X man, we read and wrote that shit.

2. "White man take acid. White man take acid and goes see the Exorcist" -SNL season 1 monologue
2. It should have been called Parsley's, Thyme's or Sage's Baby to not confuse us, though it would anyway since Rosemary's Baby was set in Manhattan as well