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The serious Catholic themes that made the original film genuinely disturbing have been flattened out into a cartoonish backstory pitting Merrin against Nazi storm troopers.
Reams of tedious exposition finally give way to a random jumble of horror movie clichés, rising to a shrill pitch of hysteria that is never remotely frightening.
Blood, flies, maggots, ravenous hyenas, power failures, grave-digging and much ineffectual voodoo ensue.
As shocking as an Dokken album cover and, finally, as pious as The Passion of the Christ.
Never feels like anything other than generic, brain-dead, Dolby-jolt, multiplex hackwork -- I kept expecting Skarsgard's habitually catacomb-prowling Merrin to bump flashlights with Lara Croft.
It rates fairly high on both the Scare-O-Meter and Gross-Out Scale, with an early hyena attack guaranteed to have you flinching in terror.
Brutal. Not for kids.
Contrived, cliché, murky, muddled, and an utterly gory mess...
More than 30 years after the original hit screens, along comes the very best of the sequels.
Most of the movie feels nothing like an Exorcist film.
This is not horror. It's sadism.