- Director: Renny Harlin
- Writers: William Peter Blatty, William Wisher
- Stars: Stellan Skarsgård, Izabella Scorupco, James D’Arcy
- Run Time: 1 Hour 54 Minutes
- Link: https://amzn.to/3yNIUen
Synopsis
We begin in the aftermath of a great battle. There are dead Roman soldiers and others. The one survivor takes the small statuette of the demon found by Father Merrin in the 1973 Exorcist film. The camera pulls back to reveal thousands of men crucified upside-down. Credits Roll.
We return in Egypt, 1949. Merrin meets up with Semelier, who tells him about a dig to uncover a lost church with a rare object inside. Merrin is an archaeologist and former priest. Merrin can’t turn down the offer, so he goes to Kenya. He still has flashbacks from the way. He is paired off with Father Francis to go to the dig. Merrin meets Sarah, a nurse.
He arrives, and none of the workers will enter the church. The hyenas are wandering around right outside. One man has a seizure out of the blue. They realize it’s a full-sized church built and immediately buried in the 5th century. Merrin and his sidekick priest enter. There’s a huge mural of Lucifer on the wall. There’s a statue of Jesus crucified upside-down. This whole church is a desecration.
Merrin and Sarah talk about her time in the concentration camp. We get a flashback showing why Merrin gave up being a priest. Meanwhile, outside, one of the boys is torn to pieces by hyenas while his creepy little brother Joseph watches.
They go to see Bession, the lead archaeologist, who has gone insane. Bession knows who he is without turning around. Bession repeats what the Nazi said to Merrin during the war. The priest in charge of the asylum says Bession was “touched by the devil.”
Back at the camp, Jeffries tries to rape Sarah, but Joseph breaks in and says, “He’s coming for you.” Joseph starts to show signs of being possessed.
Merrin goes into the church that night and finds a secret passage. He finds a big Pazuzu statue and is attacked by flies, but there’s no harm done. Jeffries notices in the mirror that his face is rotting and falling apart. Sarah has a bad experience and decides the whole place is cursed. Jeffries goes missing in a messy way, and Father Francis says the natives are about to revolt out of fear; he’s sent for military backup.
Merrin decides to dig up the graveyard that night to see what’s buried down there. While he’s doing that, the villagers break into the hospital and tie up Joseph. Then they do their own African version of an exorcism. The forces inside Joseph fight back and kill some of the villagers.
Merrin confronts Francis. Why did they bury dozens of empty coffins? He tells the tale of the pre-credit sequence battle. They built this cursed church on that site. Another expedition was here fifty years ago, but every single one of them just vanished, so the Vatican ordered a coverup. This is said the be the very spot where Lucifer landed after falling from Heaven.
They find Jeffries tied up and half eaten in the old church. Major Granville decides to take it out on the natives, and he prepares for a real battle. They natives are coming to kill Joseph, so Francis takes him and hides him in the evil church, where they won’t go. Meanwhile, a sandstorm approaches them all. Francis begins the Catholic exorcism ritual, which he hopes will work out better than the African one.
Merrin finds a photo of Sarah with Bession; he was her husband. She’s the evil one, not Joseph. Sarah then kills Father Francis. The battle between the natives and the soldiers begins, and the little demon-head statue gets buried in the sandstorm. Merrin goes to the church to confront Sarah and save Joseph. Merrin reclaims his faith and wins the day… until a few years later when it all starts up again.
Commentary
There are some pretty good gore shots in this. The hyena attack is intense, and the sets inside the buried church are really cool. Father Merrin’s backstory was nice to see. There are more than one completely unnecessary jump scares in this, mostly just harmless loud noises out of the blue.
There was a lot of controversy during the making of this film, and apparently, this was heavily reshot and rewritten during filming. It got a lot of bad press because of all this, but it’s really not that bad.