Film Review: Exorcist: The Beginning (2004)
As promised, here’s my review of Exorcist: The Beginning (2004). Warning: SPOILERS. Also, I was feeling extra snarky when I wrote this, so if this is your favourite movie, you probably shouldn’t read this.
The movie begins more than a thousand years ago, in what appears to be the aftermath of a battle where a lone monk walks among the corpses. He finds another monk, dead, holding a very familiar-looking idol’s head… In a sequence that’s both eerie and a hint of the wonky CGI that is to come, crows feast on the corpses, which then suddenly begin to rise, crucified upside down. Jump to 1949. This is when Father Merrin will face Pazuzu for the first time, a meeting hinted at in The Exorcist. So, before the infamous Mesopotamian demon turned up in the US to possess a random tween, he was hanging out in colonial East Africa, more precisely Derati, at a buried church, wrecking havoc among archaeologists, local tribes, and British army alike. At the time, Merrin and the Church were on the outs due to what he’d gone through during WW2. He only went to the dig site because an art collector asked him to get a certain Pazuzu-shaped statuette that had been found there. The Vatican is also interested in this mysterious church, and sent a priest, Father Francis, to investigate the discovery because apparently there are no records of it. In addition to the buried church, there’s a cemetery where the victims of a plague that killed everyone 50 years previously were buried, which you just know is going to end up being connected to it somehow. Apart from Merrin and Father Francis, other people at the dig or nearby are: Sarah Novak, the only doctor; Jefferies, the foreman; Emekwi, Merrin’s host, and his 2 sons, James and Joseph; Chuma, the driver/interpreter; and the Turkana, the local tribe. Not at the site? The former head archaeologist, Bession, who was taken to a sanatorium after going mad, leaving behind a slew of Pazuzu sketches. All this was a good set-up for a demonic horror movie. The church looked pretty spooky, and so did the tunnels beneath it where Pazuzu’s altar was located. The opening flashback promised some more backstory for the demon, who wasn’t even named in the first movie. Also, this wasn’t the usual possessed child scenario, so there was hope for something different. Unfortunately, the filmmakers squandered it all.
When Merrin arrives in Derati, things are definitely not going well. Chuma may not be superstitious, but the rest of the workers are, and they refuse to go into the church, which they blame for all the weird goings-on. Jefferies is your typical colonial asshole and not even the fact that he’s suffering from a particularly bad rash that is getting closer and closer to crossing the line that separates You Really Should Have That Looked At from outright body horror can stop him from relentlessly hitting on Sarah. This of course creates even more tension when the doctor and Merrin start to bond over their respective Nazi-related traumas. I think the use of WW2 was a bit cheap. It feels like the movie went for the easiest recognizable scenario of unfathomable horror. There's nothing new or original about what it has to say - just the same predictable conversations about evil that have been done to death in countless other movies. Still, it worked for the characters, who went so far as smooching. This will make things pretty awkward later on and reminded me of Stigmata (1999) and its own They Didn’t Really Think This One Through, Did They? situation…
In their first trip to the church, Merrin and Father Francis find it desecrated, most notably with the huge crucifix that no normal human could’ve moved on their own now hanging upside down. Later, when he finds the tunnels, Merrin sees fresh blood on Pazuzu’s altar. I understand that the movie didn’t want to waste too much time getting there, but why would the original builders of the church have included a way to reach the tunnels, or why didn’t they fill them with earth and rocks? Despite the different setting, Exorcist: The Beginning apparently decided it couldn’t do without a possessed child scenario and so, while James is taken by some terrible looking CGI hyenas, Joseph falls into a mysterious coma after showing no reaction to his brother’s totally fake-looking gruesome death. This will be followed by flickering lights, whispers, shadows at the clinic, and nightmares, some of which quite bloody. Joseph was actually luckier than Bession, who slits his throat in front of Merrin after he goes to see him. Father Gionetti, who runs the sanatorium, tells him Bession was merely touched by evil, and not fully possessed. This of course means that Pazuzu’s real vessel is somewhere else. Well, it can’t be Jefferies because he disappears and is later found mutilated over the church altar, being pecked by hungry crows. Unfortunately, this draws the attention of the British army, who turns up to demand answers from the Turkana, who rightly blame it all on the spooky church, including the stillbirth of the Chief’s baby, who came out all covered in maggots (ew!). Frankly, I was more interested in the church’s backstory, which Father Francis ends up spilling after denying to know anything. According to the Vatican’s records, the place where the church was built was said to have been the place where Lucifer fell, and the army shown in the beginning actually turned on each other. There’d been a previous attempt, made 50 years ago, to investigate the legend, but the 4 priests and the locals all disappeared. To hide everything, a fake cemetery was made and the disappearances blamed on a plague. It’s a shame the movie didn’t properly focus on that, and decided to drag colonial tensions into this. Of course, these previous displays of power make one wonder why Pazuzu is taking so long to finish this new batch of interlopers, and why he didn’t do anything this big in the original movie.
Before Merrin gets to do any Catholic exorcising, the Turkana try to drive the evil out of Joseph, with some painful bone-snapping results. While I was watching, I couldn’t help thinking about E. Hoffmann Price’s The Return of Balkis, where Pierre D’Artois says that a Christian exorcism would mean nothing to the Queen of Sheba. Would a shamanic exorcism or a Christian exorcism mean anything to a Mesopotamian demon? Anyway, after basically ignoring everything about the real mythical Pazuzu, someone remembered that he was a wind demon, so the dig site and the clinic get surrounded by a sandstorm that makes it impossible for anyone to leave. That’s some really bad timing (or some great timing if you happen to be an evil demon hoping to cause the maximum possible damage) what with the British army and the Turkana getting ready for war, plus the Turkana wanting to kill Joseph, whom they believe to be a vessel for evil. Of course, the only place to hide is the spooky church sitting right on top of Pazuzu’s altar… Chuma gets speared by one of the tribesmen, leaving only Merrin, Father Francis, Sarah, and Joseph as the ones not taking part in the bloody fight, which the movie insists on showing. Is that really what people want from a The Exorcist movie? Merrin tasks Father Francis with exorcising Joseph, only turns out he got it wrong, which Merrin realizes when he goes to Sarah’s room and finds it to be a demonic mess. Huh, when exactly did she do that? Because we saw her room more than once and it looked fine. On top of that, he finds out that she was Bession’s wife, something no one ever mentioned throughout the movie. That’s just weird. I would’ve expected some talk of her difficult situation. Also, this possession progressed very slowly, especially when you take into account how powerful the movie has made Pazuzu. Think about it, he drives Bession mad, affects Joseph, controlls the hyenas, gives Jefferies the rash from hell, stops the shamans from exorcising Joseph, and ends up pushing 2 armies to fight each other, while also making the soldiers fight among themselves. And he’s doing all of this simultaneously. It doesn’t seem that he’s spread too thin - he just comes across as insanely powerful. So, to have Sarah act normally right until the end doesn’t make much sense. Oh, and in case you missed it: Merrin KISSED Pazuzu. That’s awkward. Though, since he didn’t use this to mess with Merrin in The Exorcist, apparently Pazuzu doesn’t kiss and tell.
Father Francis doesn’t last long against this ancient evil and the final confrontation is just Merrin, a demonic Sarah, and Joseph. Most of this takes place in the tunnels, which are thankfully quite dark. I say ‘thankfully’ because I don’t want to know how the sequences of Sarah running at the camera or crawling up the walls would look like in broad daylight. Really, the whole thing just looks embarrassing. Yes, this movie was made all the way back in 2004, so 2 decades ago, but I’ve re-watched the first 2 X-Men movies (2000 and 2003) more than once and the effects still hold. Apart from ridiculous CGI abilities, Sarah also gets the standard purple, puffy + slashed makeup. None of this is remotely scary, and some of it is even unintentionally funny. Unlike Regan, Sarah doesn’t make it because Pazuzu pulls the plug on his way out and a stream of blood comes out of the back of her head. I honestly don’t know how that happened. Then again, Regan didn’t quite make it because of the exorcism, so… Outside, everyone is dead, and the church is on its way to be buried again. All this pushes Merrin back into priesthood and the Vatican.
VERDICT
Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) had some potential, but it was wasted by the filmmakers, who decided to widen the scope of the movie to include a useless colonial B plot, while at the same time pushing the usual possessed child storyline. The demonic activity was hit and miss, and the movie did too good a job diverting the audience’s attention towards the red herring. Yes, we did spend time with Sarah, but not as someone who was being possessed. The characters were pretty bland and frankly, it was hard to care about any of them. Not even Pazuzu managed to liven things up. Since Merrin was facing him in his own turf, I expected him to be different than in an American suburb. Instead, it was more of the same. I’ve already mentioned the lousy CGI, but it was so awful that it deserves to be mentioned again. Seriously, it was bad. There was gore and nightmares and mysterious noises and flickering lights, but the movie never became truly scary. Pazuzu deserved better.
By Danforth