Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

The Exorcist III Blu-ray Movie Review

Devil's Due

Reviewed by Michael Reuben September 22, 2014

The Exorcist III is being released both separately and as part of The Exorcist: The Complete Anthology.

When one considers all the obstacles thrown in his way, it's amazing that writer/director William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist III (sometimes known as "The Exorcist III: Legion") is as good as it is. Blatty conceived the film not long after the runaway success of William Friedkin's The Exorcist in 1973, based on Blatty's bestselling novel. The new work was not so much a sequel as a spinoff, featuring the police detective played by Lee J. Cobb as he investigated a baffling case with demonic overtones. Friedkin was initially interested in directing, but the project idled so long in development hell that Blatty wrote it as a novel, Legion, which was published in 1983 and sold well enough that Blatty sued The New York Times for omitting it from their best seller list. (He lost.)

The novel's success attracted the interest of production company Morgan Creek and finally got the project before the cameras, with Blatty directing and George C. Scott taking over the lead role of Lt. Kinderman, because Lee J. Cobb had suffered a fatal heart attack in 1976. To play the terrifying Gemini Killer (loosely based on the real-life Zodiac Killer) who has mysteriously returned from the dead with infernal aid, Blatty cast Brad Dourif, whose performance in Child's Play had demonstrated his talent for extreme characters.

With these leads and a solid supporting cast (including cameos from such faces as Larry King and Fabio), Blatty proceeded to film a reasonably faithful adaptation of his novel, which used Kinderman's pursuit of the revived Gemini Killer to raise provocative questions about the nature of evil. But Morgan Creek insisted that the film be titled "The Exorcist III", to capitalize upon what it considered a franchise, despite Blatty's objection that the franchise had been killed by the disastrous reception accorded Exorcist II: The Heretic. Then, at some point, executives at Morgan Creek suddenly awoke to the fact that the story didn't contain an exorcism and required Blatty to undertake major rewrites and reshoots to add one.

The crowning irony came when the box office dropped precipitously after the first few weeks of release in 1990. That's when Morgan Creek solemnly informed Blatty that the problem was the title. After Exorcist II, they told him, the Exorcist franchise was dead—just as Blatty told them in the first place.

On the fifteenth anniversary of the day when Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) plunged to his apparent death out of Regan MacNeil's bedroom window, his friends, Father Dyer (Ed Flanders) and Lt. Kinderman (Scott), spend the day together, each claiming that the other needs cheering up. In Kinderman's case, it's certainly true. That morning, he visited the crime scene of the gruesome murder of a young boy, Thomas Kintry (James Burgess), whose brutalized corpse bore the unique signature of a serial killer known as the Gemini, captured and executed fifteen years ago. In short order, Kinderman has two more bodies, both of them killed in bizarre ways, both of them priests and both bearing the marks of the Gemini. Kinderman's sergeant, Atkins (Grand L. Bush), cannot understand his boss's distress at these marks, because he is too young to know that the Gemini's methods were kept secret as a way of weeding out false confessions. Only those who worked the case and the killer himself would know those details.

Investigation reveals a connection between each victim and the MacNeil case of demonic possession. It also leads to a secure hospital ward for the severely disturbed where a recently awakened catatonic has told the head doctor, Temple (Scott Wilson, wonderfully creepy), that he is the Gemini Killer. According to Dr. Temple, the patient was brought in fifteen years ago with no memory and no ID, but when Kinderman enters his locked cell in the disturbed ward, he is shocked to find a man in a strait jacket who looks exactly like the late Damien Karras. The man, "Patient X", will always appear that way to Kinderman, but to us he will often appear as another supposedly dead man, namely James Venamun, the Gemini Killer. (Miller's presence is the one genuine benefit from the reshoots, since Blatty had originally rejected using him due to his advanced alcoholism.)

It is at about this point, just when things are getting really interesting, that the film begins to slip away because of the changes forced upon Blatty by Morgan Creek. Substantial portions remain of the battle of wills between Kinderman and the Gemini, but these should have been the central focus, along with a deeper inquiry into the Gemini's past and the forces that made him both a serial killer and a hater of Christianity. (A few references have been kept, but these are tossed off casually.) As the Gemini says at one point, the three MacNeil-related murders were "a favor for a friend", but his real goal is to reclaim his mantle, which is why he keeps insisting that Kinderman authenticate his identity to the press.

Unfortunately, Blatty has to keep breaking away from this intriguing storyline to introduce an entirely new character, Father Morning (Nicol Williamson), who will become the Lankester Merrin of this film. Entering at just the right moment, as if drawn to the location by some unseen hand, Father Morning commences the ritual of exorcism just in time to interrupt the Gemini as he is about to claim his next victim. With some occasionally laughable effects, Blatty then stages an abbreviated version of the sequence that William Friedkin did far more effectively in the original Exorcist.

That the exorcism sequence lacks conviction isn't Blatty's fault, though, because it shouldn't be there in the first place. The return of the Gemini Killer isn't a case of demonic possession, and there's no rational purpose in driving the spirit of one dead man out of the body of another. The entire conclusion of The Exorcist III, which I will not spoil for those who haven't seen it, makes no sense, whereas the conclusion of the novel Legion at least had a coherent logic (and presumably Blatty's original version of the film followed that plot).

Still, The Exorcist III is worth seeing for its spooky atmosphere and for the performances by Scott, Miller, Dourif, Wilson and also by Nancy Fish as Nurse Allerton. Try to decide whether she's good or evil. I never can.

The Exorcist III Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Blatty rejoined with his cinematographer from The Ninth Configuration, Gerry Fisher, for The Exorcist III, and Fisher's ghostly lighting of long hospital corridors, Georgetown streets and, in one of the film's most memorable sequences, a dream vision of the afterlife that borrows elements from Grand Central Station and a jazz nightclub (among other things) is one of the best things about Exorcist III. Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray improves on its 1999 DVD presentation, but that is faint praise. This is one of Warner's lesser catalog efforts, with a transfer that is reasonably detailed but suffers from indistinctness and weak contrast often enough to be noticeable. Black levels are sometimes crushed in places where I suspect they weren't intended to be (notably in the Gemini's hospital cell), thereby losing shadow detail because levels of black aren't properly differentiated.

There's a fine layer of video noise that some viewers may mistake for grain, but it isn't. Indeed, the film's grain pattern is largely invisible—the result, I suspect, of efforts to cram a 111-minute film with multiple soundtracks onto a BD-25, resulting in an unacceptably low average bitrate of 19.40 Mbps. (It is entirely possible that some of the indistinctness and lack of fine detail results from high frequency roll-off to facilitate compression.) Warner Home Video now stands alone in consistently refusing to use BD-50s for all feature films of this length, whether catalog titles or not. Even its affiliate, the Warner Archive Collection, knows better.

The Exorcist III Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Exorcist III was released in Dolby Stereo, then remixed for 5.1 when it was released on DVD. This is presumably the same 5.1 mix included here in lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1. It's a conservative remix that remains largely front-oriented except for a few specific effects, primarily the voices that Kinderman begins to hear (or thinks he does) once the Gemini murders resume. Chief among them is a rumbling demonic growl that seems to come from nowhere and, in this presentation, has greater presence than I remember from any previous version. (Blatty has never been known for subtlety.) In the exorcism that forms the grand finale, Blatty and his sound crew employ all the usual tricks, but none of then achieve the impact that William Friedkin managed in his original film, because, among other things, Friedkin spent almost two hours slowly building up the suspense to the exorcism, whereas Blatty was building to something else and had to insert an exorcism as a sort of diabolus ex machina. The creepy score is by Barry De Vorzon, who also scored Blatty's The Ninth Configuration.

The Exorcist III Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Except for the teaser trailer (480i; 1.33:1; 1:06), the disc contains no extras. Warner's 1999 DVD of The Exorcist III was similarly devoid of extras.

The Exorcist III Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Since The Exorcist III was first released, many efforts have been made to locate the footage needed to restore Blatty's original version, but without success. The official word is that Morgan Creek discarded everything. Until and unless one of those miraculous discoveries is made that occasionally happens with "lost" films, the current version is the only one available. Warner's Blu-ray presentation is merely adequate, but it's not likely to be upgraded. The film itself is worth your time, even in its present form, and on that basis, recommended despite the indifferent video.

Note: Since this review was published, Shout Factory has attempted to reconstruct the film's original version using lesser sources. Blu-ray.com's review can be found here.