Critical reception
The film received a strongly negative response. Reports indicated that the film inspired derisive audience laughter at its premiere in New York City. William Peter Blatty claimed to have been the first person to start laughing at the theater in which he saw the film, only to be followed by the other patrons ("You'd think we were watching The Producers"). William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist, recalled hearing a story in which angry audience members at Exorcist II's first public performance began chasing Warner Bros. executives down the street within the first 10 minutes of the screening. Friedkin saw half an hour of the film: "I was at Technicolor and a guy said 'We just finished a print of Exorcist II, do you wanna have a look at it?' And I looked at half an hour of it, and I thought it was as bad as seeing a traffic accident in the street. It was horrible. It's just a stupid mess made by a dumb guy – John Boorman by name, somebody who should be nameless, but in this case should be named. Scurrilous. A horrible picture." Friedkin later said that this sequel diminished the value of the original, and called it "the worst piece of crap I've ever seen" and "a freaking disgrace." He later added: "That film was made by a demented mind."
Variety wrote, "Exorcist II is not as good as The Exorcist. It isn't even close." BBC film critic Mark Kermode stated "Exorcist II is demonstrably the worst film ever made. It took the greatest film ever made and trashed it in a way that was on one level farcically stupid and on another level absolutely unforgivable. Everyone involved in this, apart from Linda Blair, should be ashamed for all eternity." Christopher Porterfield wrote in Time Magazine, "Most sequels offer more of the same. This one offers less of the same. But what remains is twaddle. In truth, the only synthesis in the film is between the ludicrous and the unintentionally comic." Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, was similarly dismissive:
Given the huge box-office success of the William Peter Blatty – William Friedkin production of The Exorcist, there had to be a sequel, but did it have to be this desperate concoction, the main thrust of which is that [the] original exorcism wasn't all it was cracked up to be? It's one thing to carry a story further along, but it's another to deny the original, no matter what you thought of it. I thought it was something even less than good, but this new film, which opened yesterday at the Criterion and other theaters, is of such spectacular fatuousness that it makes the first seem virtually an axiom of screen art.
Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film zero stars out of four and declared it "the worst major motion picture I've seen in almost eight years on the job." John Simon wrote, "there is a very strong probability that Exorcist II is the stupidest major movie ever made," and Jack Lewis wrote in the Daily Mirror: "It's all too ludicrous to frighten, and the only time you're likely to hide your head will be in shame for watching it." Donald McClean wrote in The Bay Reporter, "Exorcist II gives us something to sink our teeth into. It's unintentionally the funniest film to come along in ages; William Goodhart once wrote a Broadway comedy, I think this is his second. The dialogue invites hoots of derision and audience catcalls, and director John Boorman strives to be intellectually scary and only succeeds in turning a former shocker into a current piece of schlock." Russell Davies wrote in The U.K. Observer, "From the start, the film is either unbearably silly or incomprehensible and, finally, both at once." Ruth Batchelor's review for The Los Angeles Free Press stated, "I never thought I'd appreciate Billy Friedkin, because I didn't like The Exorcist very much, but Exorcist II: The Heretic makes The Exorcist numero uno look like Citizen Kane [...] This movie is a laughable horror [...] It should be Exorcised out of the theatres." Bernard Drew wrote in The San Bernardino Sun, "it is ridiculous — hopelessly confused and incomprehensible. Upon who's [sic] feet to lay the blame for this disaster I do not know [...] There's blame enough for everybody involved in this." Spanish film critic Fernando Trueba's review in El País called Exorcist II "a stupid and useless film whose mere existence is difficult to justify." Alexander Walker wrote in the London Evening Standard, "Apart from being incomprehensible much of the time, the film is pretentious, all of it. Whatever possessed them?" Joe Pollack wrote in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, "Sequels usually are not as good as the original motion picture, but they're not usually as bad as Exorcist II: The Heretic, which is, in a word, atrocious. Filled with claptrap and nonsense signifying nothing."
Leslie Halliwell described the film as a "highly unsatisfactory psychic melodrama which [...] falls flat on its face along some wayward path of metaphysical and religious fancy. It was released in two versions and is unintelligible in either." Leonard Maltin described the film as a "preposterous sequel [...] Special effects are the only virtue in this turkey". Steven Scheuer wrote, "This may be the worst sequel in the history of film." Danny Peary dismissed Exorcist II as "absurd." In his 1984 book The Hollywood Hall of Shame, Michael Medved called the film "a thoroughly wretched piece of work," and added, "Richard Burton is a laugh a minute." Edward Margulies called the film a "calamitious, head-scratching, sequel" and "a rollicking mess," and wondered, "whatever possessed them?" The Blockbuster Entertainment Guide to Movies & Videos gave this film its lowest possible rating and dismissed its story as "the expected demonic shenanigans."
In contrast, Pauline Kael preferred Boorman's sequel to the original, writing in The New Yorker that Exorcist II "had more visual magic than a dozen movies." Kim Newman commented that "Exorcist II doesn't work in all sorts of ways... However, like Ennio Morricone's mix of tribal and liturgical music, it does manage to be very interesting." Director Martin Scorsese asserted, "The picture asks: Does great goodness bring upon itself great evil? This goes back to the Book of Job; it's God testing the good. In this sense, Regan (Linda Blair) is a modern-day saint — like Ingrid Bergman in Europa '51, and in a way, like Charlie in Mean Streets. I like the first Exorcist, because of the Catholic guilt I have, and because it scared the hell out of me; but The Heretic surpasses it. Maybe Boorman failed to execute the material, but the movie still deserved better than it got."
Author Bob McCabe's 2000 book The Exorcist: Out of the Shadows contains a chapter on the film in which Linda Blair said it was "one of the big disappointments of my career," and John Boorman commented: "The sin I committed was not giving the audience what it wanted in terms of horror... There's this wild beast out there which is the audience. I created this arena and I just didn't throw enough Christians into it". McCabe offered no one answer as to why Exorcist II failed: "Who knows where the blame ultimately lies? Boorman's illness and constant revising of the script can't have helped, but these events alone are not enough to explain the film's almighty failure. Boorman has certainly gone on to produce some fine work subsequently... When a list was compiled for The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made, Exorcist II: The Heretic came in at number two. It was beaten only by Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space, a film that generally receives a warmer response from its audience than this terribly misjudged sequel."
In a 2005 interview, Boorman remarked:
It all comes down to audience expectations. The film that I made, I saw as a kind of riposte to the ugliness and darkness of The Exorcist – I wanted a film about journeys that was positive, about good, essentially. And I think that audiences, in hindsight, were right. I denied them what they wanted and they were pissed off about it – quite rightly, I knew I wasn't giving them what they wanted and it was a really foolish choice. The film itself, I think, is an interesting one – there's some good work in it – but when they came to me with it I told John Calley, who was running Warner Bros. then, that I didn't want it. "Look", I said, "I have daughters, I don't want to make a film about torturing a child", which is how I saw the original film. But then I read a three-page treatment for a sequel written by a man named William Goodhart and I was really intrigued by it because it was about goodness. I saw it then as a chance to film a riposte to the first picture. But it had one of the most disastrous openings ever – there were riots! And we recut the actual prints in the theatres, about six a day, but it didn't help of course and I couldn't bear to talk about it, or look at it, for years.
As of January 2025, Exorcist II: The Heretic holds a 10% rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes based on 69 reviews, with an average rating of 3.6/10. The site's consensus reads, "Hokey mystical effects, lousy plotting, and worse acting directly tarnishes the first's chilling legacy." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 39 out of 100 based on 11 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews.
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