Popular reviews

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★★ 13

  This movie is like "how to direct a good horror movie 101", and that it is only the second movie directed by a guy who was a novelist for most of his career makes his confidence and skill even more impressive and worthy of study. Blatty is of course a lunatic who takes all that Catholic shit super seriously, which is why this movie is so frightening. The hospital hallway scene, if you've seen it, you know the one I'm talking about, should be studied in film school. It's a S tier scare, but most of the movie just builds an unbearable sense of dread and tension just with dialogue and spooky atmosphere. So when Blatty really opens up the…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 15

  100

  The man in cell 11.

  First re-watch in ten years or so. I first caught it after I fell in love with William Friedkin's 1973 classic, and I just don't think my 13 year old mind could handle such a cold, clinical departure from the ambiguous ruminations of faith that the original film offered. Whereas The Exorcist explored the fruitlessness of institutions when dealing with demonic possessions and the mysteries of faith, The Exorcist III argues that, with or without demons, the structures of the institutions around us are perpetually on the verge of collapse. George C. Scott's performance is molded out of frustration, often crumbling into fits of rage and tears as he thrashes against a seemingly unstoppable…

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★½ 14

  This is my go to Exorcist movie. I love and appreciate Friedkin’s amazing genre masterpiece but ever since I spotted the VHS tape for Exorcist III in my Father’s collection as a kid I’ve been terrified by this film - its the most glorious feeling. 

  “IT’S A WONDERFULL LIFE”

  If you stripped all the horror elements from Exorcist III, I’d still pay all the money in the world to watch the insane chemistry between George C. Scott and Ed Flanders. I have a confession... Even though I know they are coming, every single amazing jumpscare within the celluloid confines of Blatty’s film STILL manage to get me. What Friedkin’s film managed to achieve with intense dread, Blatty’s film achieves with sheer terror.…

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  Review by pd187 ★★★★★ 26

  you could do a whole room 237 frame-by-frame on this, one of the truly hideous, unrepeatable achievements of studio horror. if yr ears perked up hearing joebob toss out blatty's time "in the psychological warfare" division of the airforce, here's some info ive collected over the years

  from counterspy:

  aadl.org/sites/default/files/aa_sun/aa_sun_19740628_p015-008.jpg

  from loompanics:

  pd187.neocities.org/patents/Books/Loompanics/The_Devil_You_Say!__by_Gregory_Krupey(1990).jpg

  The Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles helped to finance the film based upon the novel by Blatty, who claimed it was based upon an actual case. Eventually, Blatty himself was revealed to be a former CIA agent, a specialist in psychological warfare. And that is exactly what The Exorcist was. The psycho-terror was conducted through the use of subliminal, subaudial sounds in the soundtrack - the screams…

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  Review by Tony the Terror 666 ★★★★★ 7

  Personally, I think that this one is just as terrifying, just as well made, and just as impactful as the first movie. I know it’s a pretty strong line with this movie where people are for or against it, but I am very much for. 

  I remember when I was a little kid, this was playing somewhere, either at my fathers house or my house and I hadn’t seen any of the movies yet so all I knew is my mom constantly talking about how The Exorcist was the scariest movie she’d ever seen and how the movie itself was evil (total product of her generation) and I got through the opening credits of this and was too scared to…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★ 19

  Missing the all-encompassing sadness and blunt craft of the original and the dumb psychonautics of the sequel but still an idiosyncratic movie with some good shocks and sturdy performances (George C. Scott is even better here than in MAN GETTING HIT BY FOOTBALL). Blatty's just not a filmmaker though, he's an OK novelist, and so when most of this consists of banal procedural exposition or theological debates in brightly lit offices, there's just nothing he has any power to do. And his affection for this sort of folksy evil talk (see all of Brad Dourif's dialogue) grates in what should be the most chilling moments.

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  Review by Evan T ★★★★ 2

  As soon as that Tubular Bells cue came in on the actual steps (not some shambolic set-piece), I just knew I was in for a hell of a ride. The Exorcist III is disarming in every way Exorcist II: The Heretic isn’t, the devil in the details surfacing vividly through Blatty’s dextrous hold on his own material. Yes, this has some seriously nasty jump-scares, but the thing that really got under my skin was the inexorably graphic detail of the killings, the descriptive dialogue proving just as effective as the vivid glimpses of blood and gore. The author in Blatty definitely shows here, but you’d be blind to say that he hasn’t got a grasp of the camera. With tight editing,…

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  Review by Matthew Christman ★★★★ 1

  Somehow avoided this until now, probably because I conflated it in my mind with the legendary turkey Exorcist II: The Heretic. It's a surprisingly treat. George C. Scott is a rip-snorting hoot, Brad Dourif is at a career-high level of creepy, and Blatty's direction is sharp and frequently unnerving. The hospital hallway scene is even better than its reputation and the jump cuts between dialogue scenes gooses the anxiety consistently.

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  Review by 🔪 Leighton Trent 🔪 ★★★★ 14

  ”IT’S A WONDERFULL LIFE”

  William Peter Blatty may be no William Friedkin, but that’s no matter. This is a different beast. This is Legion.

  The style of our beloved '73 classic is left out to dry here in Blatty’s own adaptation of this direct sequel to the original Exorcist story seventeen years after it hit the big screen. But where Friedkin used dread and the pyrotechnics of craft to push that genre masterpiece to the highest of horror heights, Blatty employs stone cold procedural terror to drive this story and us the audience to the brink of hell itself. It’s a game of cat and mouse, like with Columbo or Hercule Poirot or Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote, but…

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  Review by FilmApe ★★★★ 11

  Patrick Ewing plays the angel of death in this, so, I hope that is enough reason to justify why I rated this the same as the first Exorcist.

  But seriously, this film is way better than it aught to be. It starts out like the horror version of Grumpy Old Men, and then just gets proper weird. The hospital is such a creepy location, and the writing in the film is very impressive. Brad Dourif's monologues are fantastic, and George C Scott going full on enraged is a thing of beauty. I also love that this film now validates the reason for the cop being in the first Exorcist, and so I'll gladly eat my writing on that one. Seriously, this film is all kinds of impressive.

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  Review by RepoJack ★★★★ 5

  I tend to avoid most franchise sequels since they generally suck, so I never got around to seeing William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist III. Consider me chagrined.

  Blatty punks us by starting out with all the Catholic "weeping statue" chicanery and then the next thing we know, we're in the midst of a police procedural with nary an exorcist or demon in sight.

  Blatty creeps up on you with a sleight of hand. As George C Scott tracks his killer things start getting a bit odd -- surreal dreams and creepy encounters. And at the halfway point, we go completely down the rabbit hole.

  Where the first The Exorcist pukes its horrors into your face, the terrors here are more…

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  Review by sydney ★★★½ 2

  Brad Dourif's single tear, George C. Scott's eyebrows and his mixture of fury and sad resignation, all the cameos and horror in-jokes, "Hey! Sorry you were murdered!", the scares that strike a weird balance between subtle and totally insane, the special effects, the sounds and music, ancient religious fears updated for a post-Hannibal world.

  If any of the elements of this had changed slightly, a different cast or more convoluted plot or more gory scenes or any number of other things, this movie would have fallen apart completely. There's something endlessly fascinating to me about those kind of movies, and watching them gives me a great sense of amusement/relief/excitement/respect. Something like seeing the acrobat reach the other end of the tightrope.