…it takes real talent to make a truly awful movie; viewing Exorcist II is like viewing the ruins of a temple to an unknown god, a brain-boggling, dreamlike, profoundly mystifying experience…

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 15, 2025

Here’s an interesting question: when it comes to sequels, which would you prefer? A boring success, or an interesting failure?

| Original Score: 4/10 | Jan 23, 2025

Watching a director attempt something wild and different, even when they fail, will hold interest more than any decent but mediocre and forgettable movie ever could. Call this particular sequel a disaster, but don’t call it boring.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 19, 2024

The final product may not equal the sum of its parts but those disparate parts are striking, daring, truly bananas, and driven by a filmmaker eager to make something truly unique, and not just in comparison to its predecessor.

| Oct 9, 2023

There’s enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies; what the picture lacks is judgment -- the first casualty of the moviemaking obsession.

| Sep 18, 2023

The script is so ridiculous that they should have gone all out for laughs in the first place.

| May 5, 2023

A rather costly load of old nonsense, distinguished mainly by fine colour photography.

| Oct 27, 2021

The theme is attacked with engaging intensity, and Boorman brings off more than one visual coup (notably the ingenious locust photography in the African sequences). Dennis Wheatley fans, at least, will love it.

| Oct 27, 2021

Here we are spared many of Friedkin's cheap shocks -- the mutilations, the vomiting, the bestiality. But what remains is twaddle.

| Oct 27, 2021

The dialogue invites hoots of derision and audience catcalls, and director John Boorman strives to be intellectually scary and only succeeds in turning a former shocker into a current piece of shlock.

| Oct 27, 2021

There had to be a sequel, but did it have to be this desperate concoction, the main thrust of which is that original exorcism wasn't all it was cracked up to be?

| Oct 27, 2021

Burton, noble enough, had his clerical tongue in his cheek, while Linda Blair was by turn fresh and appealing then sly and sinister.

| Oct 27, 2021

Exorcist number one was nasty twaddle. The Heretic, to give it a slightly different definition, is nasty drivel. With it, the Hollywood superstition bonanza surely reaches rock bottom.

| Oct 27, 2021

Richard Burton potters through it with a look of weary distaste, or even nausea.

| Oct 27, 2021

This time round, trying to turn a horror comic into a thinking man's theology seminar, we're afflicted by the kind of pseudo-seriousness that Hollywood isn't equipped to do at all. Give me the green bile anytime.

| Oct 27, 2021

From the start the film is either unbearably silly or incomprehensible, and finally both at once.

| Oct 27, 2021

Evil spirits are at work in Exorcist II. They've produced a film both exploitive and amateurish.

| Oct 27, 2021

After seeing what Boorman hath wrought, it becomes pathetically apparent that he was trying to wing it with an obscure conception.

| Oct 27, 2021

Beneath the gloss of color and bluster, this movie offers absurd action based on a stupid premise. But those who waste time and money on it can always say "the Devil made me do it."

| Oct 27, 2021

Sequels usually are not as good as the original motion picture, but they're not usually as bad as Exorcist II: The Heretic, which is, in a word, atrocious.

| Oct 27, 2021