Exorcist III and Hellraiser: Bloodline – A Couple of Sharper Cuts

Despite doomsaying around the fate of physical media, a range of boutique companies seem to have done just fine producing high-quality releases of movies and television, stuffing the optical discs they put out with a range of fun extras. One such company is Arrow Video, and one thing they’ve managed to do occasionally is pack entire alternate versions of movies onto their blu-ray releases. Many’s the film out there which has had a shaky, mixed reception as the result of studio interference or other forms of creative confict, only for a new cut to prompt a re-evaluation.

For this little article, I’m going to look at two movies Arrow have put out where the provision of a rare alternate cut offers new insight into the original. In one case, we’ve got a movie which was already reasonably well-regarded which is significantly improved once the studio interference is dialled back (and which I’ve reviewed before, so I won’t be doing a deep dive on the original release). In the other case, I’ll cover both the theatrical release and the workprint version of a movie which was an absolute franchise-derailing bomb on its first release, and whose alternate cut offers a tantalising sniff of what might have been.

Exorcist III: Legion

Back in 2010 I did my review of the Exorcist series, in which my opinion of The Exorcist III was broadly in line with the broader consensus: very good in its early stages, but studio interference botched the ending. In particular, the studio demanded reshoots to make two major changes, one pointless (but disrespectful), and one which completely sabotaged the conclusion of the movie.

The first of those changes was that they decided that they wanted Jason Miller, who had played Father Karras in the original, to play “Patient X”, which would require reshooting all the scenes where Brad Dourif was playing him. This was pointless, because Father Dyer and Lt. Kinderman were already recast in this one, so there was no reason why Karras should have been treated specially, and disrespectful because Dourif is much better at the brief of “serial killer inhabiting the body of a dead priest” than Jason Miller is. (To be fair, Dourif looks a bit too young – but if you can believe in supernatural infestation, you can believe in supernatural preservation or regeneration.)

The Power of Blatty Compels You

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Let me share something personal: I’m an atheist. I try not to be a dick about it, I try not to judge other people based on their beliefs. But at the same time, there are limits. Some beliefs are, frankly, so ridiculous that I just can’t respect them, and I consider people who embrace them to be kind of foolish. Young Earth Creationism – the idea that the world we live on is only a few thousand years old and was made more or less in the way the book of Genesis describes it – is one of those beliefs; it flies so directly in the face of myriad well-established scientific facts that I can’t, as much as I try, see it as a legitimate religious belief – to me, it’s more like a wildly counterfactual crank theory.

Another one of those ideas is demonic possession. I just can’t credit it with being real. It’s all too clearly a product of an inability of early societies to comprehend certain forms of mental illness and physical disorders. That isn’t a judgement on the sophistication of those societies or the intelligence of our ancestors – we physically didn’t have the instrumentation to even detect the EEG symptoms characteristic of epileptic fits until comparatively recently, for example, and we still have only fuzzy and possibly incorrect ideas about what causes schizophrenia. Read even one or two Oliver Sacks books and you’ll soon conclude that the human brain is a bizarre and horrifying instrument with an infinite capacity to torture and meddle with its owner if it even gets slightly out of whack.

I can completely see why people even today can conclude that an unknown force is responsible for a drastic change in the personality of their loved ones. But I can’t bring myself to respect that belief, especially when it discourages believers to not look for the real source of a sufferer’s problems and instead try to make them go away with a religious ritual.

That said, although I think exorcism is a completely terrible idea in real life, I also think it’s kind of fun as a subject for horror stories. The idea of losing control to an external force is terrifying regardless of what you believe. So, when I saw a boxed set of the five Exorcist movies for £10 I grabbed it to see if the original is as good as I remember it being, and to see if the sequels and prequels were as horrible as the rumours suggest.