Genre: drama, thriller, horror

Exorcist: The Beginning

Directed by Renny Harlin,

Written by Alexi Hawley

Starring Stellan Skarsgaard, Izabella Scorupco and James D'Arcy

Classification: 18A

Rating: *½

The devil is back in Exorcist: The Beginning, and he is more disgusting than ever. Not more scary, just really yucky, in a kind of maggots-on-a-pizza-slice way.

The invisible co-star of the head-spinning pea-soup-spewing schlock classic of the seventies, The Exorcist (1973), has inspired two inferior sequels and countless parodies. At least in its conception, Exorcist: The Beginning was supposed to be of a higher order.

The idea of a "prequel" was prepared by the first movie, in which the Dutch priest, Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow), reveals he met the demon that has possessed Regan before, when he was a young missionary in Africa. Exorcist: The Beginning, under different titles, directors and casts, has been in production purgatory for seven years. The late John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Ronin) quit the film in mid-shoot because of ill health shortly before he died. Paul Schrader (screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and director of Affliction) made an entire movie that was never released.

Instead, the studio preferred to go with director Renny Harlin (Cutthroat Island, Cliffhanger), the least interesting of the three filmmakers, but the most vulgarly commercial in his orientation.

Predictably, he has amped-up the computer-generated imagery, as we discover in the teaser opening, where the camera pulls back to reveal a plain full of corpses of Roman soldiers, and tens of thousands of bodies hanging upside down on crosses.

Ignoring the essentially inward story of The Exorcist, he has created a sprawling anything-for-a-jolt movie, more in the spirit of a midnight teen-scream flick than a portrayal of a dark night of the soul. The movie plays like Indiana Jones, with races through tombs and tunnels, spear-throwing African tribesmen, a sand storm, snarling hyenas.

Skarsgaard plays the younger Father Merrin, and if he doesn't quite bring Von Sydow's gravitas to the part, his frowns and flat delivery might be interpreted as the expressions of a lost soul. At the movie's beginning, he's merely Mr. Merrin, a lapsed priest with a drinking problem, whose faith has been shattered by the events of the Holocaust (permitting a lot of dubious use of black-and-white Nazi flashbacks).

Merrin is hired by an antiques collector to recover a lost artifact in a recently discovered sixth-century Byzantine church in Kenya (the oddity of the location is intentional). He is accompanied by a young priest (James D'Arcy), who's working for the de rigueur Vatican cover-up.

In the missionary outpost, Merrin meets the pretty resident doctor (Izabella Scorupco), a concentration-camp survivor, who inspires Merrin to have lust in his heart, as well as more black-and-white Nazi flashbacks. Meanwhile, the demon, who lives underneath the church in an old pagan shrine, makes its presence felt often and with a chaotic lack of purpose. A young native boy named Joseph (Remy Sweeney) causes beds to tremble and objects to fly. Menstrual blood flows, a baby is stillborn, jerky computer-generated hyenas tear a child apart, a mental patient slashes his throat.

None of these scenes is very nice, but a random series of gross-outs is also not suspenseful. How can the Evil One win when he has such difficulty sticking to his task?

The last couple of reels try desperately to spur the movie from morbid to active. The natives start to grow restless and the British Army is called in to make things worse. A sandstorm rises and the movie goes from the profane to the ridiculous. Down in the bowels of the church, the demon flies about like a bat in the kitchen, chased by a newly refrocked Father Merrin, panting as he reads out the exorcism ritual.

Rumour has it that Paul Schrader's version of Exorcist: The Beginning will be released on the same DVD as Harlin's movie. This might justify the price of a rental: Schrader was raised as a Dutch Calvinist and should provide a sober, serious devil, one who's out to steal souls, not just stimulate gag reflexes.