John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic is one of cinema's most instructive failures — not because it failed, but because of how, and why, and in front of whom. David Kittredge's documentary Boorman and the Devil takes this disaster seriously as a cultural object, and the result is more illuminating than most success stories. The premise is almost too rich: Boorman had been offered the original Exorcist, turned it down because he disliked the material, and then was somehow persuaded to helm the sequel to a film he'd rejected. That's not a recipe for auteur cinema — it's a recipe for the exact kind of expensive, incoherent, visionary muddle that Heretic delivered. Kittredge gets Boorman on camera to walk through the wreckage with commendable candor. The documentary does generous work. What Kittredge perhaps underweights, as Peter Bradshaw's review notes, is the structural recklessness of the whole enterprise: taking on a project you fundamentally don't believe in is a different kind of risk than making something bold you do believe in. Boorman hired Rospo Pallenberg as a creative consultant — a friend whose influence irritated the cast — and the film became a kind of committee nightmare with a surrealist's visual instincts still firing underneath. The historical context is the best thing about Boorman and the Devil. This was the era of Godfather II, of studios trusting brilliant directors on instinct, of 'blind bidding' where theater chains paid upfront on the strength of names alone — a practice that Heretic's disaster effectively ended. It was also, crucially, 1977, which meant going up against Star Wars. William Friedkin's Sorcerer suffered the same fate that year. The stars were not aligned. There's a small act of critical revisionism happening here that's worth taking seriously. Pauline Kael, at the time, made a contrarian case for Heretic on the basis of its experimental visuals — a position the documentary apparently nods toward without fully engaging. The film pioneered Steadicam in ways that influenced everything after it. Linda Blair and Max von Sydow returned. Richard Burton is in it, looking haunted in a different way than the script intended. Louise Fletcher operates a mind-reading device that is, yes, completely absurd. But absurdity and ambition aren't mutually exclusive, and the documentary's real service is insisting we look at both at once. The Warner Bros. executives being chased down the street by an enraged audience is, whether apocryphal or not, a perfect myth for what happens when franchise machinery collides with a filmmaker working against his own instincts. Boorman recut the film. The damage was done. What Kittredge gives us is a thoughtful autopsy — and a reminder that nobody, as William Goldman observed, knows anything.
