The Exorcist, William Friedkin’s second masterpiece in three years (The French Connection), is now available on Blu-Ray in an extended director’s cut.
Too bad I no longer have an Amazon sponsorship (thanks, Denver lawmakers!), because I highly recommend that those of you with a Blu-Ray player add this one to your home video libraries.
Tubular, dude.
Bells.
Saw this on the big screen several years ago for the 25th anniversary release or whatnot.
People were laughing at it.
It was then I determined that lots of youngerish people today don’t apply the willing suspension of disbelief to the proper things.
Applied to movies that were made before CGI: good.
Applied to economic policies spouted by gibbering mouth-breathing elites: bad.
I saw it (again) when it was finally released in Great Britain (sometime around 1998). I was living in Italy and we were vacationing in England. The film had been banned for years, and it was great to see it — the extended cut, for the first time, in fact — on the big screen. Got a very favorable reception.
I think our wannabe hipsters here — the kinds who find Japanese horror films about frightening answering machines, eg., truly “terrifying” — have been so conditioned to hate the past and anything that isn’t appropriately Other, that they pretend to be more jaded than they actually are.
I suspect some of those who laughed went home and slept with the lights on that night.
I think that today’s young folks are so used to having everything spelled out for them. The “monsters” appear and get to works slicing and dicing. Even if the story is nonsense, there is some baddie up there cutting off heads.
Aside from the make-up on Linda Blair, most of the horror is psychological. Nothing EVER jumps out of the closet.
My older kids saw what I thought of as one of the most horrifying movies (which hasn’t aged well, but still) Prince of Darkness and they said it didn’t scare them a bit.
It was the premise of the movie that was so horrifying. Up is down, black is white, there was no Jesus Christ – or God- just evil. THAT was scary. I felt icky for days.
That movie scared the crap outta me. The Catholic thing, I think.
William Friedkin came out with a third great film right after Exorcist called “Sorcerer”. Nothing to do with sorcery, but was a remake of the 50’s French film “The Wages of Fear”, starring Roy Scheider. 4 people from different corners of the world (Scheider as an Irish NY gangster who robbed the wrong Italians, a corrupt French banker, a Palestinian terrorist, and a shady Latin American assasin type) are all hiding out from their various pursuers in some godforsaken dump in Central/South America when an oil drilling operation going on nearby blows up. Their ticket out is to drive 2 trucks loaded with unstable nitroglycerin back thru the mountain roads and jungle to blow out the oil-well fire. Great flick.
Sorcerer is one of my favorites. Still waiting for a widescreen DVD release.
I’ve got Billy Wilder’s “Witness for the Prosecution” teed up on DVR. Marlene Dietrich, rrrrrAAAwwwrrr!
I have Tubular Bells on CD!
Haven’t seen Sorcerer. I’ll have to find it.
I like Wages of Fear (Criterion has a nice DVD presentation), but I think Sorcerer is even better.
I have Wages of Fear, but never bothered with the remake. I suppose I should.
I’ve got Billy Wilder’s “Witness for the Prosecution” teed up on DVR. Marlene Dietrich, rrrrrAAAwwwrrr!
He directed her in A Foreign Affair, too. It’s a good movie, but probably most notable in my mind for how blatantly Soderbergh ripped it off for The Good German. People seem to think he just boosted elements of The Third Man and Casablanca as some kind of homage, but practically the whole story is lifted from Wilder’s film.
Do it, Abe. You won’t regret it. For my money, it’s more streamlined and more tension-filled than Wages.
Know what scuks about blu-ray? Blu-ray.
Your mother sucks big cocks in hell.
I’ll have to check out “Sorcerer.” “Wages of Fear” is one of my all-time fave movies.
Can’t compare with Hedy Lamar frolicking naked through the woods like a deranged Primavera.
That’s HEDLEY!!!
Sorcerer is about a guy trying to get a truckful of nitroglycerine across a whole lot of rainforest, isn’t it? For to blow up somethings?
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