In Phuket, OL tended to favor Animal Planet and Discovery Channel. Too much like high school biology for me. Whenever he does email, I swipe the remote. One night I stumbled on The Exorcist II: The Heretic. OMG, never has a bad movie been so good.
The movie picks up four years after The Exorcist ended. Reagan is living with a guardian in NYC and seeing a therapist. A priest investigating what happened to Father Merrin gets tangled up with her and her therapist. Is she really exorcised of her demon?
The locusts. Don’t even get me started. How ridiculous they looked. Better to leave it to my imagination. The hypnosis machine with a humming light. Hysterical.
So many great lines from the possessed priest including when he snipes at the bus driver to hurry up because the girl needs to get home. Or when he tells the train conductor, leave the girl alone she’s mine.
The bizarre sequences in Africa in a church up the side of a rock wall. Love when Reagan requests that the priest call her by her name. He calls her Reagan. Then she says no call me by my dream name. So he calls her pazuzu. After the demon that is possessing her or trying to.
There’s this bizarre mind linking and then the supposed scenes in Africa. Loved when the priest got stoned for being a devil worshipper at the base of the African church in the wall and Reagan felt every blow.
Or when she walks out of the mental institution in a nightgown with a ginormous shopping bag. The nurse asks what she is doing and Reagan tells her it’s okay. Hello? Patient walking out of mental hospital and nurse does nothing.
Then there is the guardian, Sharon, who is weirdly obsessed with Reagan.
I love when the priest meets with the African man who survived Pazuzu. It involved walking on nails toward the man in a locust costume and falling headfirst only to wake up on a hospital floor.
Reagan had a habit of parading around in her nightgown with her nipples readily visible Ofc. Such an experience.
She’s also prone to sleepwalking on rooftops.
The African doctor/Pazuzu survivor appears to have gotten his Phd from driving away the locusts.
There are good and bad locusts. If the wings are stroked the bad part of locusts can reversed. Reagan is a “good locust.” But the priest has been touched by the locust and is therefore very grey.
The psychiatrist counseling Reagan is an ice queen who neglects her kids for Reagan.
She drops them to go to DC.
Best cab ride ever is in DC with Sharon and psychiatrist. Never have I laughed so hard at a violent car crash.
Best is when the psychiatrist leaves the burned corpse of Sharon on the neighbor’s front stoop. Getting the paper never was so traumatic.
Mind you no one seems to hear the cataclysmic events happening in the house in Georgetown until the house literally tears itself apart and everything is over. And then suddenly they care.