Exorcist: The Beginning Reviews

I didn't expect much from this flick but since Renny Harlin's movies have always been a guilty pleasure of mine, I still wanted to check it out. First of all, you have to keep in mind the convoluted production for this movie. Indeed, at first, Paul Schrader was supposed to direct it but then, when he was done, the studio didn't like his version so they hired Harlin to re-shot 90% of the whole thing so there was a fair chance that Harlin's version could or should have been totally worthless. Well, to be honest, even if it was nothing really amazing, I didn't think it was one of the worst movies made by Harlin, in fact, everything he made afterwards, except for 'Cleaner', was so much weaker than this movie. Indeed, the whole thing looked fine (except for some very dated and poor looking CGI effects) and the beginning was actually pretty solid. Eventually, it was from the moment that these hyenas showed up that I started to loose interest in the damned thing. Indeed, from that point, they kept throwing at the viewers some rather non-sensical and boring horror scenes but I still believe that the whole thing had some potential. By the way, since this version turned out to be a flop, they eventually released Schrader's version later on as well but even though it was better received, it was a still a flop as well so you could say that Morgan Creek invested a lot of money in this project but didn't get much in return. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its rather lame reputation, I don't think it was such an awful movie but it was still pretty weak and I don't think it is really worth a look.