Exorcist - The Beginning Details

This sloppy prequel plunders liberally from William Friedkin's original spine tingler, yet remains the crudest of shockers. Paul Schrader was removed as director from the project after his cut was deemed too cerebral, but could it have been worse than replacement Renny Harlin's bad B-movie? The film outlines how future Georgetown exorcist Father Lankester Merrin (Stellan Skarsgård) loses his faith during the Nazi occupation of Holland and rediscovers it in a remote area of Kenya in 1949. There he examines a buried 5th-century church — mistakenly built on the spot where Lucifer fell — where evil and CGI hyenas lurk. It turns hilariously funny when the possessed one is revealed and the demonic scares and swearing begin. Skarsgård retains some of Max von Sydow's solemness as the young Merrin, but the rest of the cast fails to rise above the clichéd gruesomeness.

One only for Exorcist completists or masochists: a disjointed horror with cheap shocks that gives the impression of being made in too much of a hurry, which it no doubt was.