Exorcist: The Beginning [2004] Movie Reviews on CinemaClock

Prior the viewing, I read many negative reviews of Exorcist: The Beginning, but I gave it a try anyway because the original Exorcist is on my top 10 list. How pissed I was when I walked out the cinema! This movie deserves every bad review written on it. A little history of the making of ETB to begin with: it was first assigned to director John Frankenheimer who died before the production. Paul Schrader then took the job and filmed a completed version which was thought by the review board not up to what they initially wanted. At last, the GREAT Renny Harlin replaced Schrader and re-filmed the whole thing, with more blood and gore. The final movie, like its history, is plagued by numerous problems. A story of Father Marrin's first encounter to the devil should be a very interesting one. However, the movie suffers from a scattered and disjointed script which does not have a clear point where it is heading to. Watching this movie is like watching a remix of the three previous Exorcists. Squeezing the remaining juice from the original doesn't promise a great movie, instead we as audiences are treated without respect and integrity. After the first 20 minutes of the movie, I had a feeling that the director had given up making a "movie", and decided to turn himself over to the devil, and mixed some random scenes full of cheap thrill and boom and jump in the hope that maybe some of us might still find them scary. Indeed, the squirting blood, cutting throat and crawling maggots will disgust the weaker stomach. And I assure you, that is what you get. Forget about the psychological terror of the first movie and its sequels or a movie with a proper plot that you can at least follow. The lack of character development is the worst out of all its problems. We learn so little about the characters that who care they are killed or not. Stellan Skarsgård delivered the most to his character considering how thin the material he was given. In all great horror movies, the most important factor is probably the character development. If we lack a connection to the characters on the screen, we do not find them being killed a horrible thing to happen. The killings in ETB are dumb, because we don't care. Without cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who also worked in The Last Emperor and Apocalypse Now, I would rate ETB 1/10. The last scene in the crave was so beautifully done that I could really feel the suffocating and claustrophobic space in which the devil is lurking and giggling. However, does one good scene save the whole movie? NO. In short ETB is a beautifully filmed piece of crap that doesn't deserve ONE viewing. Do yourself a favor, rent the original, skip this one. I had never paid a ticket and watched anything as bad as this on the screen. 2/10.