Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

(On TV, November 1998) Despite a languid pace, the original The Exorcist still holds up reasonably well today. The sequel, however, is pure and unmitigated crap. Destroyed by ridiculous matter-of-fact beliefs in psi powers (made even more sad by the age of the movie; how is The X-Files going to sound in twenty years?) and a worship of primitive cultures, the whole is so sleep-inducing that I ended up fast-forwarding most of the middle hour. The climax is laughable in the most inept-movie sense. The result isn’t even worth your time.